The Age Of Happy Problems

133262

THE
AGE
OF

HAPPY
PROBLEMS

Books by HERBERT GOLD

Novels

BIRTH OF A HERO

THE PROSPECT BEFORE US

THE MAN WHO WAS NOT

WITH IT
THE OPTIMIST
THEREFORE BE BOLD

Short Stories

LOVE AND LIKE
FICTION OF THE FIFTIES

(Editor)
Essays

THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

THE

AGE

OF

HAPPY
PROBLEMS

Herbert Gold

THE DIAL PRESS NEW YORK 1962

Copyright 1962 by Herbert Gold
Copyright 1952, 1954, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961

by Herbert Gold.

"The Rise of the Treeniks" copyright 1961
by Metronome Corporation

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-16333

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The essay, "A Dog in Brooklyn, a Girl in Detroit: A Life Among
the Humanities," is published for the first time in this volume.

Acknowledgment is made to the following publications in whose
pages these essays first appeared: The Atlantic Monthly, March

1957, for "The Age of Happy Problems;" Mademoiselle, February

1958, for "How to Be an Artist's Wife;" The Atlantic Monthly, No-
vember 1957, for "Divorce as a Moral Act;" Charm, October 1959,
for "The Bachelor's Dilemma;" Partisan Review, Summer 1957, for
"The Mystery of Personality in the Novel;" Hudson Review, Win-
ter 1958, for "The Fair Apple of Progress" (originally published as
"The Purity and Cunning of Sherwood Anderson") ; Hudson Review,
Winter 1957, for "The New Upper-Middle Soap Opera;" Playboy,
February 1958, for "The American as Hipster" (originally published
as "The Beat Mystique"); The Nation, November 17, 1957, for
"Hip, Cool, Beat, and Frantic;" Metronome, February 1961, for
"The Rise of the Treeniks;" The Atlantic Monthly, September
1960, for "Fiction of the Sixties;" discovery, Number 1, for "Cleve-
land: Inflation-on-the-Erie;" Hudson Review, Summer 1952, for
"Paris: Notes from La Vie de Boh&me;" The Yale Review, Autumn
1954, for "Americans in the Port of Princes;" Playboy, June 1961,
for "The Great Divide" (originally published as "The Great Amer-
ican Divide"); Playboy, September 1960, for "The Changing Vil-
lage" (originally published as "The Restless Mecca"); The Noble
Savage, Number 3, for "Death in Miami Beach."

DESIGNED BY ALAN M. HEICKLEN

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN, INC,, SCRANTON, PA.

For Ann and Judy

Contents

INTRODUCTION ix

PART I: AMERICAN EVENTS

The Age of Happy Problems 3

How to be an Artist's Wife 14

Divorce as a Moral Act 26

The Bachelor's Dilemma 34

The Mystery of Personality in the Novel 42

The Fair Apple of Progress 56

The New Upper-Middle Soap Opera 68

Hip, Cool, Beat, and Frantic 79

L The American as Hipster 79

2. Hip, Cool, Beat, and Frantic 91

3. The Rise of the Treeniks 103
Fiction of the Sixties 106
A Dog in Brooklyn, a Girl in Detroit:

A Life Among the Humanities 118
vii

viii CONTENTS

PART II: AMERICAN PLACES

Paris: Notes from La Vie de Boh&me 139

(Avec Tout Conforts)

Cleveland: Inflation-on-the-Erie 156

Haiti: Americans in the Port of Princes 166

Reno: The Great Divide 182

Greenwich Village: The Changing Village 193

Death in Miami Beach 218

Introduction

THIS is A REPORT about where one man stands on some
matters of teaching, learning, writing, love, marriage, work,
and the prospect of death, and how he came to this stand
in the cities of America.

Setting out a few final, summary pages, I wish to try
to call up what I have discovered in the pleasure of
writing these interim communiques, twelve years of voy-
ages around part of the world and up certain of its
dilemmas. Most of the sections of this book are aimed at
specific and nonparallel subjects Americans abroad, the
hipsters, divorce, Miami Beach, Sherwood Anderson, the
craft of fiction, the vocation of a teacher and yet each
seems to mark out part of the map, a place on a roadway.
The map takes shape as I trace my way from one gathering
of thoughts to the next. How can I total it up? What is
the map of the map?

Well, to begin with, Plato was wrong. The life of
contemplation is not sufficient. Neither is virtue enough.
And for another thing, Plato was right. He knew that men
must learn to come together in the practice of intelligence
and moral privilege.

ix

x INTRODUCTION

An instructive practical joke has been played on us
by history since the time of Socrates. Now we know too
much and we have had too much experience with evil
ever to be long satisfied with the hope of ideal private
purity in the quest of virtue and knowledge. To be alone
in wisdom is to possess only the ghost of wisdom; it is
like being a lover with no one to love. And as in love and
understanding, so in the effort toward a moral life. We
cannot accept the bondage of others without being our-
selves enslaved. The separated soul moves inexorably from
smugness to explosion. The contemporary literary parody
of Diogenes is Hemingway, who turns out to be seeking
good repute more than glory, formula more than wisdom,
peace to his troubles and not a resolution to the challenge
of mortality. Looking for an honest man in the market
place, Diogenes carried a lantern, not a mirror. The auto-
biographical compulsion in a writer leads to a pathos which
has the character of the sentences on tombstones; we do
not stand moved by the stiff words we weep to honor
the body buried beneath. And when the words have been
inscribed by a self-indulgent living corpse, we stand uneasy
in our sympathy, we are excluded by self-pity, we have
been had. The body is not even present. It is elsewhere,
drafting new appeals before the mirror. Style, even the
style of genius, shrivels to fashion in the paper fire of
vanity. To save ourselves we must return to Aristotle's sense
of the good man the man who exercises his power of
intelligence in an effort to master time and mortality
through works apart from building his own person. Out
of this effort come tragedy and comedy in art, comes the
labor of freedom in life.

Therefore, as an American and a writer, I have aspired
in these essays to an active use of my strength within the
terms of those possibilities available to me. Given my
failings of wisdom and virtue, there is plenty of room for
future risk and maneuver under this program.

INTRODUCTION xi

And not only do I need changing, but my friends
do too, and America, and the world. Everyone knows this.
Not everyone knows that there is still quite a bit of life
freedom to create left in America and the world. I now
ask myself what everyone asks upon ritual occasions: Is
there a better time coming? Is final disaster just ahead?

Well, the way to know and affect the future is not
through stupefied waiting, solemn assertion, or viewing
with alarm. Gravity of tone and deep seriousness of man-
ner befit television announcers more than thinking human
beings. We need all our sources of energy, including appe-
tite and play, lightness of spirit and agility of body. We
need a whole list of things. Let us pin the list above the
breadbox:

We need to hold the flower of feeling in our hands
without crushing it. American wives need to squeeze
through the narrow gates of vanity and self-loathing; Amer-
ican husbands the same. They both need to give up trying
to solve the problems of marriage by a pious worrying
about "our relationship." An active use of ourselves does
not consist in panicking into fallout shelters, passive politics,
make-do marriages, jobs defined by that dream world of
"security." We need to give up the fashion of having
"insights," which, in a society delighted by psychology
because it is undelighted by most other things, has become
a repulsive game of one-upmanship. I insight you; you
insight me; together we know nothing of value. Instead,
why don't we engage in some common labor? It is mere
vanity to go about the earth listening for the rattle in the
throats of the dying, and a suicidal vanity to listen for it
in our own throats. Let us stop congratulating ourselves
on our subjectivity, trying to find the whole number in
an infinite series of fractions, and start putting two and
two together. Having "Healthy Goals" is not a proper goal,
either; leave that to the insurance salesmen and the educa-
tionists; for if we are alive, goals arise beautifully, like the

xii INTRODUCTION

hypotheses of a scientist or the intentions of an artist, cor-
recting themselves through continuous activity in the con-
tinuous here and now.

Nice hobbies for the retired and planned distractions
for the adolescent cannot disguise the fact that intelligent
participation in community life in America is increasingly
difficult. We need more civil defense against the spirit of
Civil Defense. The notion of intelligent participation in
one's own life also becomes a paradox when most of an
intelligent adult's waking hours are spent at a make-it,
make-out, make-do job. An archetypical confession begins,
"I was a teen-age senior citizen." Who is old and who is
young? When is motion a substitute for action, paralysis
a substitute for patience? If we set out to examine the
quality of American life in this time of happy problems,
we must go forth knowing that every issue is in doubt.
Fortunately, a fine old saying is just as true in its reversed
form: Doubt moves mountains.

Perhaps, amid so much doubt about society and per-
sonality, we should be reminded again of the basic require-
ment for human life, once the primary demands of food,
housing, and shelter are met. True, the Russians, the
Chinese, Africa, world government, missiles, bombs, fall-
out, highway congestion, sex, and junk mail all present
problems which fully qualify for personal reflection and
action. (Mail it back! Return to Sender!) But as individ-
uals, what we need first of all is to find a work we like;
and as a nation, a future to believe in, contained within
an immediate present worthy of respect, engaging our best
energies. Then the problems of love and "communication,"
boredom and anxiety, delinquency for the young and
real-estate-promotion pensionvilles for the aged can dimin-
ish into larger possibilities. When the emphasis is put
where it belongs, on creative personal and national activity,
not on a succession of phony goals cranked out by a suc-
cession of disposable deep thinkers, we will be equipped

INTRODUCTION . xiii

to respond significantly to the great social and political
challenges.

These are finally all metaphysical questions, questions
about the meaning of human life on earth. There is no
doubt that the whole concept of man and civilization is
up for grabs. Military weaponry provides a dramatic symbol
and advance scout of the enemy, but it is only one mani-
festation of the tendency within men to seek destruction.
Wide awake, we find ourselves asking a nightmare ques-
tion: Is humanity possible? An impious question; we must
ask it. But before we can deal effectively "in general" with
the menace of race suicide, we must first in particular,
as individuals, not only believe we have a right to survive
but also want to survive.

One of the most popular poems in contemporary
anthologies of verse is that which concludes: <r We must
love one another or die." Students and teachers enjoy this
poem; it expresses a fine, elevating fantasy alternative;
the proper choice can be made so nice and easy. But the
poet who wrote it, overtaken by scruple, squirming, appar-
ently an honest man, has long since revised his thought. In
later editions of W. H. Auden's work, the poem has a new
conclusion: "We must love one another and die." It remains
in its lying form in the anthologies; editors have not yet
corrected the soft text with the hard truth, which is so
much more difficult to accept. For the sake of life we must
try to love one another moral imperative; but we shall
all die fact no matter what we do. In the meantime,
loving if we can, we send our lives down the roads of
possibility, meeting the inevitability of final mortality
when it comes and, in prospect, at every pause of joy and
sorrow. And yet, despite death, despite suffering and mur-
der, despite cruelty and vanity, despite stupidity and in-
justice and perhaps, indeed, because of these natural
enemies in the jungle of society which is a part of the
jungle of nature we can take joy in the power we are

xiv INTRODUCTION

given toward recognition and remedy of defeat and toward
the exercise of each possible victory of the human spirit.
This book, then, represents a going and a coming, in
and out of the cage of self and the cage of the real world.
I grant that it runs the risk of tourism; tourism, however,
is a general condition of spirit in our time. Those Southern
intellectuals who took their stand in an agrarian Dixie with
a manifesto a generation ago are mostly presently biv-
ouacked in the North. We carry as much tradition as we
can bear, but look for our truths where they may wander.
Both the world and the self are spinning in space. To find
stable balance while in rapid motion is the dangerous
modern endeavor.

An element of presumption remains. How dare we
fret from our unique privileges about our personal dilemmas
in a time of mass war, mass destruction, mass inertia, mass
everything, when the will to death seems to be on the
way to total and inane triumph? How dare anyone, how
dare I? There seems to be no other way to think about the
prime matters of life on earth than to gather the evidence
from our own particular lives. Otherwise we fall victim to
what I think of as the Uncle Distortion. "Let's talk about
things in general/' asked my uncle.

"What about?"

"Things in general."

"But what about?"

"Things in general, didn't you hear me? You've been
to college," he said irritably. "You should be able to talk
about things in general."

But I'd rather not; and I'd better not.

Instead, through place and situation, time and event,
these essays attempt another sort of reckoning with the
voyage projected through fictions and characters in my
stories and novels. Truth is truth only by a defiant mar-
riage of words and acts. (I mean here true statement about
how we live and how we should live and why.) How can a

INTRODUCTION xv

conventional symbol, a word, be joined to a specific, never-
to-be-repeated experience thrown up in time? That is a
perpetual question in the history of thought about the act
of thinking. The word, which is a distorting glass, is also
the only means we have toward knowledge. Marriage,
which is a distorting convention about love, wrenches two
creatures out of one life and puts them together again in
a new and altered one. There is an excuse for marriage. It
builds as it distorts. There is an excuse for microscopes
and telescopes (though they do indeed distort) and so '
there may also be an excuse for words in general and for
these particular words, written to various ends in various
places, over a dozen years, and yet coming round to some
repeated general points about our lives together in America.
There is a connection between a specific busted gambler
in the Western Union office in Reno, writing that practical,
insane, collect poem which goes RUN OF LUCK SEND MONEY
QUICK, and the way we all live now, the anxious shuddering
through our lives of politics, love, work, and expectations
for the future.

Accidents of autobiography, observation in streets and
books, generalizing theory, experimental hypothesis, the
tentative and the evanescent these are the accumulations
of an effort at specific focus. I have not even excluded
ideas about literature as a legitimate part of thought about
the real world. Inconsistencies appear regularly; contra-
dictions are a steady part of the enterprise; but I have hoped
to give the evidence in experience for judgments; and in
this, the habit of telling stories the habit of the true lie
is of good service. Discreetly I warn myself, however,
against the danger of seduction by what we can now recog-
nize as the Nephew Distortion an oblivious, dreamy trust
in particularity and the intercourse of thought and event

A note about the psychology of creation should be
made here. Some poets commit suicide. But not in the
middle of the working day. For the poet or novelist at

. xvi - INTRODUCTION

work, even the most depressed one, a cock-crow of relish in
nature sounds through the dawn air. He knows that if he
tracks the cock by his call, he may find a bedraggled
rooster howling from the top of a dungheap while the
chicks pluck corn, the hens shuffle feathers. Which doesn't
mean that the cock's song is not really triumphant. And the
poet too, judging himself and the world most severely,
nonetheless finds the world and himself worthy of the loud
call of judgment, at least while he is at his labor of song.
He keeps libidinous and happy with the hope of mastering
his experience.

We have now touched upon a revelation which must
seem shameful to the puritan heart. Let us give it away
brazenly. The scientist, the philosopher, or the artist always
takes a secret pleasure in the vividness of his feelings and
the power of his invention, even if the occasions which
elicit them are tragic. Trudging across the world with the
common sack of morality on his back ("He still has that
sack!" Henry David Thoreau), the poet may condemn
himself with the puritan's shame. What right has he to
make joyous explorations in suffering? But he does. Why
should Dostoevski ease his guilt for even a moment by the
monuments he erects upon his dark excavations? He does
anyway. This self-love and/or self-hatred may be a flaw
and is certainly an injustice viewed from the traditional
ideal of democracy, in which privilege is won only as a loan
or a mandate. But there is a justification in history and
in democratic intention (Fortunate that there is a justifi-
cation; otherwise it would go unjustified! ) Life in the world
and the life of art are alike in this, that we are awakened
to reality by tragedy, dulled by inferior imagination and
a clogged, eventless passage through experience. We need a
deepening of the sense of reality more than we need an
inflation of moral okayness. Anxiety is caused more by
boredom than by any other sort of suffering. To see clearly,
playfully, with sorrow, inventively clearly must be left

INTRODUCTION xvii

as an individual option even in a tragic time. The fact
of death has always been democratic; the chance of sudden
death has never been so impartially shared; but no two
deaths are alike. To act with love upon vision is still the
best aim we can give the living soul.

And who knows if that modern faith may not yet be
redeemed? that to understand and to feel can make the
condition of mortality habitable. Stoicism provides a leaky
roof, but the best one available to the private citizen while,
chortling furiously in his kitchen, weaving his fuses and
dipping his time bombs, he plots the reform of the universe.
He might start by venturing out into the rain; he might
start with the holes in his own roof.

HERBERT GOLD

January 1962
San Francisco

PART ONE

American Events

The Age of Happy Problems

RECENTLY I HAVE had occasion to live again near my old
college campus. I went into a hole-in-the-wall bakery where
the proprietor recognized me after ten years. "You haven't
changed a bit, son/' he said, "but can you still digest my
pumpernickel? The stomach gets older, no? Maybe you
want something softer now a nice little loaf I got here/'
He had worn slightly. But for me the change was from
twenty-two to thirty-two, and it is this ten-year time that I
want to think about the generation which came back from
the war to finish college on the GI Bill and is now deep into
its career. We are the generation which knew the Depres-
sion only through the exhilaration of the burgeoning New
Deal and the stunned passion of war. I remember the bank
crash because my mother wept and I said, "If we're poor
now, can I wear corduroy pants?" For the most part, we
were taken care of and never hopelessly hunted jobs. Now
some of us say we are cool, say we are beat; but most of us
are allrightniks doing okay. We are successful. In the late
forties and the fifties, it was hard to know economic struggle
and want and for the most part we didn't experience these

- 3 *

. 4 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

traditional elements of youth and it was hard for the skilled
and the trained not to know success. We did not doubt
overmuch. We have done well. How well?

"Money money money/' as Theodore Roethke says.

I have married my hands to perpetual agitation,
I run, I run to the whistle of money.

Money money money
Water water water

I should like to take a look at some of the college ideal-
ists. The lawyer, fascinated by "the philosophy of law/' now
uses his study to put a smooth surface on his cleverness.
Cardozo and Holmes? Very interesting, but let's find that
loophole. The doctor who sent flowers to the first mother
whose baby he delivered now specializes in "real-estate
medicine" his practice gives him capital for buying apart-
ment houses. The architect who sat up all night haranguing
his friends about Lewis Mumford and Frank Lloyd Wright
now works for a mass builder who uses bulldozers to level
trees and slopes, then puts up tri-level, semi-detached,
twenty-year-mortgaged, fundamentally identical dormitories
for commuters. He admits that his designs make no decent
sense, but they do have that trivial, all-importaut meaning:
"It's what the market wants, man. You'd rather Ftaught city
planning for six thousand a year?"

The actor becomes a disc jockey, the composer an
arranger, the painter a designer; the writer does TV scripts
in that new classic formula, "happy stories about happy peo-
ple with happy problems." How hard it is to be used at our
best! One of the moral issues of every age has been that of
finding a way for men and women to test, reach, and over-
reach their best energies. Society has always worked to level
us. Socrates has always made it hot for the citizens in the
market place. But there was usually room for the heroic
hemlock not a serious deterrent and perhaps rarely so

THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS - 5

much room on all levels as in the frontier turbulence of the
nineteenth and early twentieth century in America. Hands
reached out like the squirming, grasping, struggling railroad
networks; the open society existed; freedom had a desperate
allure for the strongly ambitious, and men stepped up to
take their chances Abraham Lincoln and William James,
Mark Twain and Melville, Edison and Rockefeller and
Bet-a-Million Gates.

Allowing for a glitter of nostalgia on what we imagine
about the past, still something has happened to change the
old, movemented, free, open American society to something
persuasive, plausible, comfortable, and much less open. We
are prosperous, we get what we think we want, we have a
relatively stable economy without totalitarian rule. "I'm not
selling out/' my friend the architect says, "Fin buying in"
Without attempting a simple explanation of the causes of
this age of happy problems, let us look at its consequences
for the new postwar young people who should be in full
action toward their ambitions and the surest, sturdiest signs
of a civilization's health.

What are these personal symptoms? How is the vital
individual human creature doing in his staff meetings, at his
family's table, over the baby's bassinet, and with that distant
secret self that he may sometimes meet at the water cooler?
Well, for this man it is very hard to be exceptional. Talent
apart, he has too much to do, too much on his mind, to give
himself over to his best energies. Think, for example, of the
writers in the advertising agencies, on TV, or in the col-
leges. They all wanted to write great books; they tend now
to prefer "competence" as an ideal to greatness. Some of
them are trying, but they risk the situation of the girl in the
short-story writing class: "I can't be a creative writer, I can't,
because I'm still a stupid virgin." She will take up going
steady, she will take up marriage; she will be mildly disap-
pointed; she will remain as she was, but aging "adjusted,"

. 6 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

"integrated/' virgin to danger, struggle, and the main chance
of love and work.

In composite, in our thirties, we of this prosperous and
successful generation are still in good health and rather fast
at tennis (but practicing place shots which will eliminate
the need to rush the net); hair receding but still attractive
to college girls, or at least recent graduates; a slight heaviness
at the middle which makes us fit our jackets with especial
care (sullen jowls beginning, too) or, if not that, a skinni-
ness of anxiety (etching around the mouth, dryness of lips) .
We go to an athletic club. We play handball in heavy shirts
"to sweat it off."

The girls we marry are beautiful in wondrous ways. Sa-
vant make-up is no longer sufficient. Blemishes are scraped
until the skin is pink and new; scars are grown away by corti-
sone injections what reason to be marked in this world?;
noses are remade, the same for mother and daughter, just like
heredity. Money is spent much more gracefully than in
those fantastic times when silver coins were put in ears and
jewels in navels.

The old truth "we must all come from someplace" is
amended in 1956. We can create ourselves in our own image.
And what is our own image? The buttery face in the Pond's
advertisement, the epicene face in the Marlboro publicity.

The matters that we are told to worry about and per-
haps we think we worry about them do not really trouble
us. The prospect of war is like a vague headache, no worse.
The memory of war is even dimmer. A depression is some-
thing which will reduce the value of our shares in the mutual
fund, make us keep the old car another year. Radioactive
fallout and the slow destruction of the human species
through cancerous mutation well, what is so much bother
to imagine cannot really come to pass. Who lets the news-
paper interfere with a good meal?

THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

Still, we are not blithe spirits; birds we are not. This
generation is particularly distinguished by its worry about
making its wives happy, about doing right by its kids (title
of a hugely popular paperbound book: How to Play with
Your Child), about acquiring enough leisure and symbols
of leisure, which it hopes to cash in for moral comfort.
Fortune reports a method used by salesmen to get the sec-
ond room air conditioner to the couple which already has
one in its bedroom. "The machine operates as expected?
Fine! You sleep better with it? So do I, that's just dandy.
But, friends, let me tell you how I sleep so much better now
that I know my kiddies are cool and comfy, too."

ITiis capitalizes on the child-oriented anxiety which the
class known commercially as Young Marrieds has been
taught to feel by modern psychiatry. Advertisements for
-McCdZ/X "The Magazine: of Togetherness/' demonstrate
Togetherness in a brilliant summer scene. The man, wear-
ing a white skirtiike apron and a proud simper, is bending
to serve a steak to his wife (summer frock, spike heels) , who
will season it for them and for their happy gamboling chil-
dren. The little boy and girl are peeking and smiling. The
wife is lying in a garden chair. Togetherness consists in the
husband's delighting his wife and kids by doing the cooking.

Actually, of course, most American women don't want
to go this far. They are already equal with men. Women are
usually too wise to define "equal" as "better than." It is not
momism or any such simple psychological gimmick that
tells this sad tale. The consumer culture in which leisure
is a menace to be met by anxious continual consuming
devours both the masculinity of men and the femininity of
women. The life of consuming requires a neuter anxiety,
and the pressure to conform, to watch for our cues, to con-
sume, makes us all the same we are customers only with

. 8 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

slightly different gadgets. Women have long bought men's
shirts; men are buying colognes with ''that exciting musky
masculine tang."

Togetherness represents a curious effort by a woman's
magazine to bring men back into the American family.
Togetherness does not restore to the man a part of his old-
time independence. It does not even indicate that he may
be the provider with an independent role defined partly by
ambitions outside his family. Instead, it suggests the joys of
being a helpmate, a part of the woman's full life, and battens
greedily on the contemporary male's anxiety about pleasing
his wife. The Togetherness theme has been a great commer-
cial success. A full-page advertisement by that canny old
American institution, the New York Stock Exchange, shows
a photograph of a harried young man pleading with a young
woman on a parlor couch. She remains unconvinced, pout-
ing, hands gloved and folded together, as brutal as the
shocked beauties in the classical halitosis or B.O. tragedies.
The caption reads: "Is the girl you want to marry reluctant
to say Yes? Do you need to build character with your wife?
Then just use the magic words: I'LL START A MONTHLY IN-

VESTMENT PLAN."

It used to be thought that answering economic needs
was the main purpose of man's economic efforts. Now, how-
ever, an appeal to emotional insecurity about money with-
out crass financial trouble can do good work for an
advertiser. "Do you need to build character with your wife?"
This is whimsey with a whammy in it. Money works sym-
bolically to stimulate, then assuage male doubts.

SHE: What can the stock do for our marriage?

HE: It can help keep it sweet and jolly because when

we own stock we are part-owners of the company.

In the image projected by this advertisement, the wife
is prosecutor, judge, and jury. She may fall into a less exalted
role, ho\yever, while her husband is downtown making the

THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS 9

money which will go for food, clothing, shelter, and sound
common stocks. That she too frets about keeping her mar-
riage sweet and jolly is obvious. The popular media again
point to trouble while pitching a new solution to her prob-
lems. One of the former radio soap operas is now sponsored
by Sleep-eze. Apparently almost everyone uses soap these
days, but not everyone has caught on to the virtues of non-
habit-forming sedatives. Want your husband to love you?
This pill will help or your money back. "Ladies! Fall asleep
without that unsightly twisting and turning."

It's time to mention Barbara. A tough wise creature of a
girl, Barbara comes to this observation out of her marriage
and love life: "Men worry too much about making the girl
happy. We seem to scare them out of themselves. Let them
really be pleased that's what we want most of all and
then we'll be happy. Delighted. But really."

In other words, long live primary narcissism! And sec-
ondary. And tertiary. But let us call it by an older, better
name respect for the possibilities of the self. This includes
the possibility of meaningful relationships with meaningful
others.

3

Our wounds as a people in this time and place are not
unique in kind, but the quality of difference makes this
a marvelously disturbing period. The economic problem, no
longer rooted in hunger for essential goods, food, housing,
clothing, is an illustration of the difference. Sure, we are
still busy over food but packaged foods, luxury foods,
goodies in small cans; housing but the right house in the
right neighborhood with the right furnishings and the right
mortgage; clothing but the cap with the strap in the back,
Ivy League pants, charcoal gray last year and narrow lapels
this year, and male fashions changing as fast as female.

It used to be thought that, given money, relative job

. 10 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

security, and the short work week, culture would then bloom
like the gardens in the suburbs and the individual spirit
would roar with the driving power of a Thunderbird getting
away after a red light.

Who could have predicted that we would have to keep
pace with a cultural assembly line in the leisure-time sweat-
shop? At least in the older sweatshop, you sighed, packed,
and left the plant at last. Now we are forever harassed to
give more, more, more. We no longer have to keep up with
the Joneses; we must keep up with Clifton Fadiman. He is
watching you. The steady pressure to consume, absorb, par-
ticipate, receive, by eye, ear, mouth, and mail, involves a
cruelty to intestines, blood pressure, and psyche unparalleled
in history. The frontiersmen could build a stockade against
the Indians, but what home is safe from Gilbert Highet?
We are being killed with kindness. We are being stifled with
cultural and material joys. Our wardrobes are full. What we
really need is a new fabric that we don't have to wrinkle,
spot, wash, iron, or wear. At a beautiful moment in Wdden,
Thoreau tells how he saw a beggar walking along with all his
belongings in a single sack on his back. He wanted to weep
for the poor man because he still had that sack to carry.

The old-style sweatshop crippled mainly the working
people. Now there are no workers left in America; we are al-
most all middle class as to income and expectations. Even
the cultural elite labors among the latest in hi-fi equipment,
trips to Acapulco and Paris, the right books in the sewn
paper editions (Elizabeth Bowen, Arnold Toynbee, Jacques
Barzun these are the cultivated ones, remember), Fortune
and the Reporter, art movies and the barbecue pit and the
Salzburg music festival. It is too easy to keep up with the
Joneses about cars and houses, but the Robert Shaw Chorale
is a challenge. In the meantime, the man in the sweatshop is
divorced or psychoanalyzed (these are perhaps remedies in
a few cases); he raises adjusted children, or kills them try-
ing; he practices Togetherness in a home with a wife who

THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS 11

is frantic to be a woman and a nonwoman at the same time;
he broods about a job which does not ask the best that he
can give. But it does give security; it is a good job. (In col-
lege this same man learned about the extreme, tragic in-
stances of desire. Great men, great books. Now he reads
Evelyn Waugh.)

In his later, philosophical transmogrification, David
Reisman consoles the radar-flaunting other-directeds by hold-
ing out the reward of someday being "autonomous" if they
are very, very good. Same thing, brother, same thing. When
he describes the autonomous personality's "intelligent" dis-
tinctions among consumer products, exercising his creative
imagination by figuring out why High Noon is a better
western than a Gene Autry, well, then, in the words of Elvis
Presley:

Ah feel so lonely,

Ah feel so lo-oh-oh-lonely.

We're in Heartbreak Hotel where, as another singer, Yeats,
put it:

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are filled with a passionate intensity.

Refusal to share to the fullest degree in the close amity
of the leisure-time sweatshop is for Mr. Riesman & kind
of ethical bohemianism. His autonomous consumer, socia-
ble, trained, and in the know, is a critic of the distinctions
between the Book-of-the-Month Club and the Reader's
Subscription, Inc., marks the really good shows in his TV
guide, buys educational comic books for his children, tastes
the difference in fine after-dinner coffee, knows that the
novel is a dead form and why. Bumper to bumper in the
traffic home from work, or jammed into the commuter train,
he has plenty of time to think. And he does think (thinking
means worrying) while the radio blares "The House with

12 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

he Stained Glass Window" or "The Magic of Believing/'
little rock-and-roll philosophical number.

Does he have a moral problem, let's say, about leaving a
hanging neighborhood "for the sake of the children"? He
s a liberal, of course, but after all, the Negroes who are mov-
ng in come from a different world, and he should not inflict
lis principles on his children. Still, there is a certain discom-
ort. He discusses it with his analyst. Why does he suffer
rom this moral qualm? Does it have some link with the
jver-ambiguous relationship with parents? What moral
Droblem? They are all psychological. Anxiety can be con-
umed like any product. And from his new, split-level, sap-
ing-planted housing development he speeds into the city
low ten miles further out.

We are a disappointed generation. We are a discon-
ented people. Our manner of life says it aloud even if dis-
creetly our public faces smile. The age of happy problems has
>rought us confusion and anxiety amid the greatest material
comfort the world has ever seen. Culture has become a con-
;olation for the sense of individual powerlessness in politics,
vork, and love. With gigantic organizations determining
Dur movements, manipulating the dominion over self which
done makes meaningful communion with others possible,
ive ask leisure, culture, and recreation to return to us a sense
}f ease and authority. But work, love, and culture need to
:>e connected. Otherwise we carry our powerlessness with
is onto the aluminum garden furniture in the back yard.
Power lawn mowers we can buy, of course.

The solution in our age of happy problems is not to in-
>tall (on time) a central air-conditioning system and a color
IV this year because the room air conditioner and the black-
md-white TV last year did not change our lives in any im-
portant respect. The solution is not in stylish religious
conversions or a new political party. The answer is not
jven that Panglossian fantasy about "the autonomous per-
:onality" which will naturally emerge out of the fatal meet-

THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS 13

ing of the other-directed consumer with a subscription to
the Saturday Review.

The ache of unfulfilled experience throbs within us.
Our eyes hurt. Vicarious pleasures buzz in our heads. Isn't
there something more, something more?

There is still awareness; there is still effort. "It should be
every man's ambition to be his own doctor/' This doesn't
mean that he should not see a dentist when his tooth hurts,
perhaps a psychoanalyst when his psyche hurts; but he must
hold in mind the ideal maximum of humanity the exercise
of intelligence and desire within a context of active health.
The Stoic philosophers had a great, although impossible,
idea for these crowding times: cultivate your own garden.
We cannot retreat from the world any more we never really
could but we can look for our best gardens within the
world's trouble. There we must give ourselves silence and
space; we can see what the will wants; we can make deci-
sions. Only then having come to terms with our own par-
ticularities can we give the world more than a graceless,
prefabricated commodity.

Hope? Some sweet Barbara is hope. And a work we love.
And the strength, O Lord, not to accept the easy pleasures
(easy anxieties) which have pleased us (made us anxious)
so far. And the strength, O Lord, you who reign undefined
above the psychoanalysts and the sociologists, the market
researchers and the advertising agencies, the vice-presidents
and the book clubs, to refuse the easy solutions which have
becalmed us so far.

Then with good belly luck we will be able to digest
strong, irregular, yeasty, black bread.

1956

How to Be an Artist's Wife

HERE is A NORMAL CASE: a girl meets a young man at a col-
lege party. Let us say he wears a red flannel shirt, leans
against the fireplace with superior ease and turns upon the
girl a pair of eyes whose ferocious intensity is half ambition
and half near-sightedness. At this age no special achievement
or public virtue has yet graced him, but his head is a con-
victed one. He is a writer, a painter, a musician, some species
of fanatic doodler in short, an artist. All he wants of his
future is to master the mystery of personality and commu-
nicate a sense of the glory of life on earth; he is hell-bent
for immortality. And that's all he wants.

In the meantime, very young, he has only his burning
with a hard, gemlike flame a variety of pouting and
sulking to keep him company at the parly. He is there-
fore rather lonely and, for the very good reason that this
girl has slim ankles, sleek legs and excellent articulations all
the way up to her scalp, he tells her about himself. Having
temporarily run out of steam about his life story, he suggests
that they go out for coffee. Turnabout is fair play. He now
begins to tell her all about herself.

14

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST'S WIFE 15 .

"I like the way you talk/' she remarks speculatively.

"And your eyes remind me of . . ." he answers.

Later, after many walks, talks, long afternoons and
longer evenings, the girl decides that it would be nice to
join this odd creature on his voyages. That at first he was
an angry mystery, like jazz, pleases her she cracked the
nut. That he has doubts and dreads and moments of ter-
rible flagging arouses her he will always need her. That
he will be a distinguished figure amid the ruck of plump
merchants, young executives and "professionals" whom her
college friends marry this tickles a fond young lady with a
bit of spunk and a romantic itch to astonish the folks back
home.

And with her help, she solemnly resolves, he will
surely be a Great Man some day. In the meantime, even
if not yet great, he is greatly skilled at coaxing and cajoling,
at little flattering rhymes and sudden gifts, in short, at
making her feel desired and capable of desire. He is no arty
egotist, oh no, not he, like those other characters on
campus. He believes that her personality is a code worth
deciphering and that all individuals are magical and that
each human creature testifies to the only divinity that mat-
ters.

Not just his own red-flannel and myopic soul. Hers
too.

"He is a big person/' she assures her roommate and
then adds, with intense feminine realism: "Or at least
I think he can be. Ill have to knock some of the preten-
tiousness out of him first Oh, but he's wonderful!"

They commune together as two people have never
before communed kisses and hamburgers and relish and
kisses.

And Time is a metaphor of change, and every event
is unique, and only through art can we take a hold on this
perpetual flux, and the life that risks all to attain all is

. 16 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

the only true one, and let's run away to a justice of the
peace. And so they are married.

What then?

The first thing, true for every marriage, is that neither
knew what they were getting into. Marriage is always a sur-
prise, full of risks and possibilities, a dangerous creative
act. Unless mated by parents or chill calculation, they
begin with the artist's defiance of history: "We will sculpt,
paint, dance, compose that unique work of the imagination
which we have a hunch can be made to live The Couple!"

Of course, there are ways of putting an end to this un-
predictable adventure. One partner can devour the other,
as the queen wasp does so gracefully: she flies very high,
chased by the drones, until she chooses one desperate love
and mates with him, a mile up in the sky, then eats his
head and returns to earth dangling his entrails; and fatly
she remembers him by laying eggs. We all know moms
like the wasp queen.

Or a man, demanding the security of easy domination,
can marry a girl who is unattractive to herself and overquick
to gratitude, therefore content to clean up after him and do
as the Master saith.

Or there is a third, very American way of abdicating
from the powers of marriage. Both partners, dreading
possibility, dreading risk, dreading life, afraid to stand up
on their own two legs as individuals, decide to make a
steadier four-legged creature that the world cannot distress.
They lean on each other to look out over the city. Like
the frogs in the old story, propped like that, they see only
what is behind them and cry out: 'Why, there's nothing
on the other side of the mountain! Why, the future is
like the past!" Each plays reassuring parent to the other.
Marriage for the propped ones brings kitchen warmth and
no venturing outside into the snow, because it might
be so cold out there.

These three marriages are fear yoked to stubbornness.

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST'S WIFE - 17

They give up the revelations of conflict and the danger
of a passionate growth together. In order never to face an
unknown, they are content to have very little to know.

Well, if our artist is an artist and a man despite his
love of pretty words or notes, he will not marry the queen
wasp, the stooping serving maid, or the shy froglet. If our
girl is pretty, lusty and knows it this is charm she will
not marry a drone, a master boor, or the amphibian without
even a jewel in his forehead.

Instead, they have married each other.

One moment she is twenty-one, being courted by
metaphysical verse and stammering hands; the next mo-
ment, voilbl She is in Paris, "the capital of misery and the
paradise of hope," breathless before the elegance of the
Place des Vosges, cooking rabbit and goat in liters of wine,
watching her husband grow his beard, and informing him
one fine evening that she is very possibly pregnant.

"I finished Chapter Seven today. This time it looks
really good."

"I think Fd better see that doctor Janine told us
about/ 7

"What for?"

"Listen to me, lout. We're going to have a baby/'

Cries of celebration, hoots and acrobatics, great tender-
ness once she gets through to him. Next morning, full
of importance, he goes off to his rented room and writes
Chapter Eight at a single fertile sitting. Or stretches a new
canvas and gets to that tricky abstraction of a guitar on the
waiting easel. Or figures out how to work an effect of honk-
ing horns in his Novum Organum for Strings and Brass
without echoing Gershwin enough for The New York
Times to notice.

American marriages being what they are, the husband
in the case ultimately feels quite as pregnant as the wife.
Here, as on many occasions, American artist husbands are
indistinguishable from American nonartist husbands. They

* 18 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

help with the dishes or feel guilty at not helping; they
suffer everything but contractions of the uterus at child-
birth; they wheel buggies built like Sherman tanks, retail
the gurgles of their offspring and challenge other fathers
to mortal combat by snapshot. But children, the most obvi-
ous potentiality of marriage, emphasize the special dangers
that the artist's wife runs. She is most vulnerable now.

Despite his several virtues, the artist is likely to fail
more than most men in living up to the standards of male
husbandry current in America. Lack of money is probably
not an important failure to his wife: she can follow him
as he makes do with the GI Bill, the odd job, the fellow-
ship, the prize. The important failure is that of fidelity. The
artist is unfaithful to his wife with the first impudent
snatch of an idea that comes along. If he is unfaithful
with women, well, that's a matter of individual character;
but this other sort of philandering is practically universal.
In pain and awful loneliness the artist's wife learns to
recognize the symptoms: a glassing of the eyes as he looks
a shapely notion up and down, a tense cockiness as he
draws himself up to court thought, a total withdrawal from
her or a pretense at participation in family life. This is
more wounding than the frankest retreat.

"Did you have a good day, dear?"

"Unh."

'Thinking, dear?"

"What? What? Unh?"

It has been established that the young wife who is
being responded to at the level of a stare and a grunt is an
exceptionally pretty, charming, and intelligent being. A
few artists marry mousy and self-effacing women who
flutter about on tiptoe in order to avoid disturbing the
maestro; such women present a wholly different set of
problems. For the purposes of this discussion I prefer the
extraordinarily pleasant specimen supplied with such gen-

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST'S WIFE - 19

erosity by American vitamins and sports and colleges
keen, artful, looking for that best which she surely de-
serves.

The hard fact about a girl of this excellent sort is that
she is accustomed, especially in America, to sustained ap-
proval. She earns it, she gets it, and she comes to require
it. Having been reared, up through her college days, in a
culture whose expectations differentiate very little between
boy and girl, she competes both emotionally and in am-
bitions with men. At the same time she expects to be
gratified as a woman by men. No complaint here we
men are eager to do it.

Then one day she marries and the picture flickers.

Abruptly or, if not at once, at least when she begins
to bear children, she can no longer compete in exactly the
same way with men. Woman, wife, mother, she has some-
how to reconcile these roles with her sociology or her
English lit and her ambitions for a career.

Many girls do it gracefully. Some fly very high. Some
fierce ones fly high like the queen wasp. Others, more
genial, manage to balance a husband and useful work in the
world without devouring the male.

In any case, what is common to many intelligent
young women in America is a need for attention as women
together with a need to compete with men like men. The
obvious solution is a combination of career and marriage,
and it works for some. It may work for some artist's
wives especially since the financial need presses hard
among a group whose collective ear is bent so ex-
clusively toward the poker-faced Muses. (A Muse is
a Greek divinity, traditionally fond of artists, tradition-
ally depicted with no pockets in her robes and no purse
either.) Malcolm Cowley tells the story of a meeting of
poets who were asked how they survived. The answer from
the back of the room, with nervous laughter: "Our wives
teach school."

20 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

This solution, however, is not always available, as for
example when the desired children appear quickly. In a
world that reserves its respect for the male's capacity as
breadwinner in the family, it may not even be a good idea
for the wife to work while the husband stays home with
his "hobby." It may be dangerous for the marriage to
gratify this American girl's itch to compete with men while
her husband fails to race in the workaday world. These are
questions that face all working wives, and each couple
solves them in their own way. If the wife is gifted enough
to be successful in her job, she and her husband can prob-
ably be adult about that success. If she does not work or
if she does, she should be able to show in action her
respect for her husband's labor. After all, this lovely young
thing is also a clever and sensible wife despite her failure
to marry a nice, steady boy; this egotist about eternal
Beauty and Truth is also a pretty good guy despite his re-
luctance to don the gray flannel uniform.

The special problem of our artist and his bride is that
he is most poorly equipped to supply all the peripheral
gratifications that compensate many women for being
women after years of being pseudo-boys, creatures incom-
prehensibly endowed with nice gimmicks and yielding
moods. Money, stability of job and home, respectable status,
these are the least of the compensations. The chief one is
the steady attendance that the typical American husband
brings his wife. She is the charming, sensitive, tasteful one;
she knows all about art and culture; she buys, outfits, equips
and decorates. "Me?" says an old-style husband. "Oh, I just
came along to write the check and admire the little lady/*
And he is present

The artist isn't Devoured by his steady concern with
the reality of his work call it egotism, call it the creative
fire he simply does not have the ability to compart-
mentalize his life in this way. He does not leave the suburb

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST'S WIFE - 21

to go bully the city for eight hours, then return fortified
by his gnawing at "real life" and express his sensitive,
tender hungers by being a dutiful spouse. He never leaves
himself except to gather himself more intensely; he lives
by stripping off his skin; he finds it hard to play a mollifying
role with his wife.

Maybe he is too much with her. Surely he is too
much with himself. A stubborn idealist, he will settle for
nothing less than the passionate best of love, a confronting
of mortality in the flavor of flesh how he needs his wife
to be his true friend! And he may want to keep this wife
at a letter's distance while he lowers himself into the well
of his fantasy. He needs to give and take love, and he needs
her, but he also needs an honorable retreat for a time,
monklike, prophetlike, "lest human voices wake us and we
drown/'

A poet said it like that. "Good-by, honey, see you in a
few days," our husband says.

Is she now supposed to cheer him off to his ease while
suspending herself until he returns? What about the steady
work of keeping a family going? Unless she is the angel
that no man deserves, she begins to brood over her many
dark moments of feeling exploited, excluded, deserted.

While not usually going so far as to be a character in
a farce, the artist's wife may try to satisfy her yearnings
to have a someone there when she needs a someone. (Re-
member that her husband is traveling in the empyrean,
or maybe only in New York to see about a gallery.) All
wives need attention from other men; no one is shocked by
this. The need of the artist's wife may be greater than most.
She has given up much; she is not compensated by a man
who keeps regular working hours and devotes himself en-
tirely to her on a generous schedule; she feels deprived.
And she really is. The only justification is that she has a
kind of spouse that most salesmen's wives do not have, a

. 22 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

rare bird with a becoming flutter to its wings and some-
thing more for her than the privilege of cleaning up after
him.

She must beware of getting her attention from other
men. It will depress her husband. It will not please her very
much. It carries more than the pleasant risks of adventure.

Unfaithfulness will imperil the main chance, which
is to get that necessary nourishment of love from the
man she most deeply has chosen. At moments he may
not be a real husband to her. He may be espoused to
the stanza or the keyboard; he is far gone and high as a kite.
But when he comes to earth again he has a special charge
and vitality for looking to his woman. If she shares his
intentions she can help him to make her a delight to her-
self, to him, and thus to those gods who love lovers. The
muscle and sinews of their bond are exercised by the
rhythms of withdrawal to creative work, followed by the
energetic return. If she loved him when she married him,
lucky for him and lucky for her, perhaps she can wait until
he comes plummeting down from the sky of his ab-
straction. After work well done, pleasure shakes the earth.
Intimacy is a consolation and a reward and a lasting
virtue, much better than an extra arm or eye for surviving
difficult times. If both husband and wife are gifted for love,
they sail proudly through both the close times of intimacy
and the troubled times of private wrestling.

Privacy. There again is that matter which is so hard
about marriage. All right, most husbands want to give it
up, or pretend to want to give it up. But here is the artist,
who not only requires solitude for his work but also seems
to cling to it as a second bride. He treasures it. Darkly he
runs to its embrace, leaving his wife and children, with the
conviction born of deep need that this lonely gathering
of himself is his perfect right It looks like childish egotism,
Narcissus wanting no one to interrupt while he studies the
reflection in the pool. Why then doesn't he go all the way

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST'S WIFE 23

to self-sufficiency? Does an artist deserve a wife? What
about the constancy of feeling that is essential to the health
of marriage?

That which we call the artist's egotism, if we don't
like it, has a more sympathetic definition: his awareness
of the mystery of personality. His sense of privacy is bal-
anced against his need to open doors to others; a jealous
integrity of the self labors toward a permanent communion
with the human race. Toward his wife at one moment
he holds up a blank no of secrecy she is cruelly excluded;
then he may demand a loyalty of understanding that suf-
focates her. When he says yes, he demands that she be all
the way with him. Tolstoi, for example, at one period in
his life insisted, under the banner of honesty, on telling
his wife what she could not bear to hear. He kept a diary,
confessing all the trivial exasperations and judgments that
are meant to pass quickly, and he forced her to read it
every day. What a brutal intimacy! Then later he ran away
to die in a railroad station rather than remain under the
same roof with a prying and hysterically devoted woman.
Go away closer, the artist may seem to be saying, unless
his wife's movements are in profound sympathy with his.

In all of this, of course, there is something quite un-
exceptional. Marriage is strange and difficult for everyone,
and the elements of strain are common to all. What makes
the familiar strangeness more difficult to bear is the artist's
special heightening of it, a need for the privacy of fantasy
in addition to the other needs for privacy and this at the
same time that, paradoxically, he demands the gift of pas-
sionate love, which can calm his awful, self-inflicted loneli-
ness. This generous and intense dialogue can be undertaken,
of course. The artist is neither a moral idiot nor a schizo-
phrenic. The richness of his privacy and his almost religious
faith in communication are the best warranty of at least
the possibility of that warmth, concern, devotion to a com-

. 24 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

mon enterprise and continuing ability to surprise and charm
which makes great marriages. Sometimes, of course, it's
the wife who puts on the paint-stained blue jeans or the
film in the eyes above a battered portable typewriter, and
then it is the husband who must look resourcefully to him-
self and wait for the rhythm of renewal and return to carry
her back to him. The structure of the marriage is similar.
The mysteries of love and respect for individual personality
are the great incentives.

The artist's wife has a good chance if she tries neither
to judge nor reform her monstrous husband. Being a bit of
a monster herself or she would have never gotten into
this fix she may yet approach that perfect union of two
separate beings which is the dream of marriage.

At bottom of all this, of course, lies the reminder that
artists are merely human. The activity of art, defined as
an ardent making, is not confined to artists. The doctor or
lawyer, who faces risk with courage, imagination, and the
ability to seize an unforeseen opportunity, needs the
strength and devotion of the artist; the businessman who
gives himself to his idea, making something from nothing
but his avid will and intelligence, is sailing amid the reefs
of creativity; even the political man, doomed to hullabaloo
and intrigue, uses his professional smile and tricks of pub-
licity to advance a vision that becomes holy as he shapes
it in the dark night of calculation. An artist is an artist is an
artist, but few of the rest of us are machines or brutes.
Every human being in the pell-mell confusion of society
pursues a lonely quest toward making his dreams coherent
with what the world allows him.

The novelty of the artist's marriage can serve us as a
dramatic example of the risk and glory of the ideal of
marriage. Achievement in solitude nourishes fruitful union;
the devoted joining of love leads to a courageous individual
courting of the unsuspected possibilities of human life on

HOW TO BE AN ARTIST'S WIFE 25

earth. Therefore love him hard! Make sure he loves you
hard!

Be strong enough to find security within risk, and ac-
cept loneliness as a challenge that can lead to the greatest
joys. Having someone to communicate with is better
if you are a grown person than having a loyal pet in the
house.

He will learn, too, though he may not be tamed.

1958

Divorce as a Moral Act

"I DIVORCE you for ever and ever, and even death shall not
break it."

Divorce is perhaps the extremest moral event which
we can consummate on earth. It may be an evil act or it
may be a good one, but it is moral all the way down we
reach it only with a rope woven of a thousand difficult
decisions. Marriage, with which divorce might be compared
under some of its aspects, has an older, premoral character.
It usually seems to be a good thing, but it is a good act
called into being without a clear sense of consequences by
individuals who are led by hope, trust, and desire. Forgive
them, Lord, they know not what they do. If it is good,
when it is good, it begins as natural virtue, not moral virtue.
It is good as growing plants are good out of the impulse
of life itself. It is good as sleep is good (sleep is a natural
virtue which the divorced sacrifice) or as waking in the
morning refreshed is good. Of course, the preservation of
marriage depends on more than natural virtue, usually to
the surprise of the married, but these later moral decisions
have come unanticipated in the flesh. They are initiated
after the natural act of marriage.

26

DIVORCE AS A MORAL ACT - 27

Natural virtue doing what is right by instinct, habit,
tradition, or in obedience to some great faith is mostly
past for man as a species. We are long out of the garden
of innocence. The angel sent down to expel Adam and Eve
was the first Reno judge, but we are conservative; despite
all thunder, trouble, and waste of spirit, we failed to rec-
ognize him. Now the day of natural virtue, when divorce
was almost inconceivable, is over. Decisions, decisions! To
shore up a marriage, despite suffering, sinking, a reign of
destruction, may be a good or an evil act it is a moral
decision; the same to enter upon this always new and
strange compact, within the clutter of bitterness and mis-
take, among the broken furniture of intentions, in the
abrupt dead silence, after much thrashing noise, of eternal
acquiescence in misunderstanding in hushed piety now:
"I do divorce you and cherish you, through age and new
marriages, all the way past death's vain effort to part us/'

For the pulse of marriage is not broken by divorce's
hemp. With children we cannot even conceive of breaking
it that eternal physical presence of the new and unend-
ing family we have created, children having children having
children, long after we have died. Our being in them is
never dead ("When, now you tell me w/icn are you coming
to live at home again, Daddy?" "Never. But 111 come to
see you every day, unless, unless " "Will I have to get
a new daddy?" "I'm your daddy and you're my daughter,
and we won't change that.") The state of being father
and child, having children, having a parent, never changes,
although the manner of that being is hurtfully altered.

Even without children, we have become ourselves
only together and in our marriage, and we go toward what
we are becoming only together and in our divorce. Divorce
is not a dissolving fluid, although it may be a corroding
acid. It is like marriage but extremer: it is to marriage as
an explosion is to rust Under certain circumstances an
oily cloth may smolder and decay under slow oxidation; in
a tight closet it bursts into fiery life. But all that is meta-

. 28 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

phor; marriage and divorce are kin in that we have formed
ourselves together within them. We do not become inno-
cent now. Your face is mirrored on mine; my body is
written on yours. Even if we love again and of course
we will our old marriage grows in the new love. In fact,
we may only reveal the meaning of our marriage through
the new love. If we are lucky and good, we will have a
new marriage which is continuous with the old one. The
more truly we are loved for ourselves, the more true this
is. The new lover loves what we can bring; a large part of
what we can bring comes from the old marriage which
we created together; the old love is now a vitally changing
element in our flesh and memory, fantasy and intention.

If the new love is happy, the old marriage is vindi-
cated: Through me you have learned to love. Or if not so
much, at least this: I left you with the strength to be
happy, an ambition to know love, the suspicion that it is
possible. Perhaps I have even left you with a belief and a
brilliant need. Together we have put an end to the mon-
strous expectations of first marriage, and without cynicism
we may now go on to what is possible.

How does a divorce grow into being? Or rather how
is it decided into being?

It is always a question of character, not incident; per-
sonality, not anecdote. Legal briefs are notorious liars, al-
though such phrases as "Incompatibility" or "Mental
Cruelty" seem to be pathetic efforts to tell a general truth.
Divorce appears as almost the absolutely free act because
almost uncaused that is, caused by anything, by any con-
stellation of accidents. It is always caused by something
but the something is never the same. Each divorce is
unique. Let us dispose of some common simplisms:

The free personality married to the dependent may
divorce. The dependent personality married to the de-
pendent may divorce. And the free married to the free may

DIVORCE AS A MORAL ACT . 29 -

divorce. In the first case the liberal, hard-loving personality
feels imprisoned by a partner who feels more and more
afloat, uncared for. In the second case, the two needful,
lonely ones lean off balance against each other until they
topple helplessly in a strident crescendo of demand for
reassurance; they can no longer hear or feel each other
they have been too close. At last, in their desperation, the
pain of clawing each other blindly in the dark seems less
than the pain of bleeding quietly and alone in the dust.
In the third and strangest case the free and the free it
is because they are free away from, not toward each other.

In each case, the origin of divorce is character. The
dynamics or rather the tactics, since this becomes that
worst war, civil war are expressed in a series of incidents.
However, these do not evolve in a straight line. They circle
each other; they grow upon and nourish each other; is not
any marriage, as Aristophanes suggests, a body? Divorce
grows as the pearl grows, as the cancer grows as the pearl
in some ways, as the cancer in others. The pearl of divorce
may be ejected by a powerful oyster. The malignancy, once
started, is generally irreversible and proliferates with rapid
fibrous insistence while the rest of the body wastes and rots.

Again: A grit of disagreement becomes, by accretion,
an intolerable burden when it is not a cause of trouble but
a symptom. The body of marriage is working against itself.
Like the seed of the pearl, the grit torments this oyster,
which increasingly busies itself with it, and so it grows;
like the cancer, it steals the strength needed for health, thus
mysteriously nourished through novel conduits; and like
the goiter on a neck, it is soon all that you can see. This
sort of grit may take years to mature within the life of its
host: the marriage resists, resists, and its struggles leave
sores, scars, and crippled healing.

When they can no longer bear the agonies of distrust
and the weariness of effort, the couple parts, in longing
and sorrow, with great staring tenderness. This false revival

. 30 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

of the old moody courting is like the pertness of the last
moments of a wasting illness. Dissolution follows fast; no
longer virgin to divorce, they fly apart in a sensual rage
quarreling about money, property, those things which never
troubled them before, bitter about her use of make-up and
his clumsy slouch, spinning off into contempt in order to
sear and so seal the wound.

True remissions sometimes occur and false remis-
sions. A springtime, a miraculously tender evening when
desire and expectation meet but these are reminders, de-
pending on sentimentality, and the foreboding returns first
and then the disease. The true remission of any disease,
in the face of destruction, seems an almost divine inter-
vention. With death plucking at your sleeve, the body
writhes in anger and joy, "something clicks," and the
course and pattern become what they have not been.
Sometimes; rarely. In the face of the death of divorce
I am speaking here of people who have loved each other
at the worst and darkest moment when they feel spiders
in their ears and mice at their hearts they may reject their
monstrous denial of the past. Does it really happen? It
can; at least we can imagine it, and that is enough to make
it possible.

On the other hand, the healthy divorce may be the
necessary radical cure of character. It is not merely surgical,
although it aches as much as surgery: the divorce disen-
tangles living flesh which has entwined and even grown
together. It is systemic; and with all its pain, it may be the
sign of a cure.

For example, her father was an alcoholic, say, and she
never could fight him through about it. Her mother failed,
naturally, but she. ... So she marries an alcoholic, finds
it impossible, and is freed of her father for the next mar-
riage. Here is another trivial, overschematic example. His
mother was a manager; he could not disengage himself; he

DIVORCE AS A MORAL ACT - 31 -

crawled into another manager's pen. But lo, under threat
of extinction as a man, he is not a child and he can free
himself. Now having practiced successfully against his
mother, he no longer needs to defeat her. He can even find,
next, the yielding, giving, and responsible woman whom
the glare of his mother's rage hid from him.

All examples are radically falsifying. Divorce is a fragile
snowflake in the December sun. Who breathes on it de-
cides for himself about it.

And there is something still more subtle, clever, and
diseased: we may make our wife or husband into the image
of the unconquered parent, just in order, later, to destroy
it. This is pathetic and comic. You were chosen, but you
did not know for what, and pressed into service against your
will, but slowly, gradually, so that you did not know what
you were doing, and then at the moment of ripeness,
when you are perfectly what your partner needs you to be
the knife! Perhaps the squealing cattle should organize
against the slaughter, but they did not see the end, only
the busy chain of events in the yard. And you were, very
likely, too busy making your own effigy. This is painful.
These are the very bad divorces, where there was no thou-
saying ever, where human beings were used as tools. We
should warm ourselves by the good divorces, rare though
they are.

"Will you go to dinner with me?" he asks.

"No/ 7 she says, "I have a jealous husband." And the
smile of complicity: he might find out, but if he
doesn't. . . . The husband is used, rearranged, scrambled,
an image formed totally of her uses for him. She does
not think: I love him. Instead, she refuses the invitation
with smug, mouth-narrowing thoughts of possessions: he
is jealous. This woman is unfaithful even if she never
enters another's bed. Her husband feels her infidelity in
their own bed in her passivity, in her absent devouring

. 32 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

of his substance. She needs him, true; he may take that
for love. She wants him perhaps. She cannot do without
him.

But even in his arms she is unfaithful. She cannot
love anyone but her incomplete, uncompletable self. She
yearns to exist, but her yearning is a bottomless pit down
which her husband and children careen.

I keep promising myself not to use examples. There
are too many individual members of divorce. As to inci-
dent, all marriages suggest them money, infidelity, bore-
dom, should we go out or should we read, in what manner
shall we love, how many children do we want. Ways of
being parents and friends. Taking and given ways. These
matters are all symptoms of character. True, they also
change character. But when they attack the marriage, it is
in their role as symptoms. All married people can supply
their own instances. Every marriage is a potential divorce.

So we are practical. "The children think!'' Those
who for so many reasons need too much of love can do
nothing to preserve a form of marriage for the sake of the
children. They perpetuate their own suffering in their chil-
dren, of course, but they can do nothing else.

Back for another moment to the knotty question of
infidelity. Imagine this: a woman who feels wronged tells
her husband of infidelities with a man now living abroad.
They struggle tears, beatings, desperate lovemaking as the
husband strives to possess her for himself. At last he for-
gives her. When does she leave him? When does the mar-
riage fly apart for all to see?

When the husband discovers that it is a lie, that she
had been helplessly true to him, that she had fought in
this hysterical way to gain ascendancy over him. Now she
feels judged utterly, and with no strength to give and take
from him, she gives up. She finds that last creative strength
of character necessary to tear herself from him. Either that
or suicide.

DIVORCE AS A MORAL ACT - 33

Rare? Mythological? Yes, but it tells how much we
need infidelity, and it tells how much we can bear to suffer,
and it tells what we finally cannot bear. We can suffer
the hurt of strength even the unsure, petty strength of a
three-week stand, fragile and self-denying; we cannot suf-
fer the wound administered by weakness by weakness
aware of its weakness and being nothing but weak.

It is said that the widow who was truly devoted to
her husband is the one who has faith in marriage, believes
in love, marries again. The unhappily married, unfulfilled
man or woman, having his problem fantastically solved by
a death he only dreamed of, must mourn forever guiltily,
regretfully, guiltily. He must even invent a justificatory bliss
in the past. Gray-faced, always in mourning, his life is over.

No I cries the grief-stricken true lover when the time
of sharpest bite is finished. This no is a yes to life. No, no,
love is too important to pass out of my life by this accident.
My dead lover tells me this: he wants me to have the best
part of his legacy, and this is the power to give and take
love. This widow or widower inspires love, deep and sensual
love, at any age; and gives and takes it, A new sharing
occurs on earth the best gift which earth offers everyone
in the democracy of blood.

May it not be, in the same way, that only the divorced
couple who sometimes were truly happy and loving have
the chance to find love again? The good divorce is that
between two who have once loved each other. Justly they
may pity the bad divorce that of beings who have merely
made mistakes, merely rectified mistakes, merely repeated
old errors bred in the family. The bad divorce is the one
of diminished decision: submission to a painful pattern, a
deathly cure by living through the sins of the fathers. The
good divorce dares to love again as only the widow who
was happy can dare to give up her fabricated memories.

Good luck! Let us divorce tenderly, and believe in each
other forever. 1957

The Bachelor's Dilemma

THE CONFIRMED BACHELOR can be defined as the man who
has the courage of his lack of convictions. Once he hasn't
made his mind up, he really sticks to it. Swinging more
and more wildly from his loosening trapeze, he is another
reeling acrobat in the disorganized circus of American love
and marriage.

Let us look at him with magical omnipresence from
a privileged station in the air above a big-city party. It could
be anywhere in America New York, Cleveland, Chicago,
St Louis, Houston, Denver, San Francisco. There is a
crowd busy, talkative, curious, and anxious of human
creatures hoping for amusement. Chink of glasses, gaggle
of laughter, roll of eye. The bachelor enters alone.

What does the wife see? Sometimes she sees him as a
bad example for her own husband, but more often she has
tender feelings for him. She sees forbidden possibility: a
handsome, perfect cavalier, perhaps, mysterious and chal-
lenging unlike her all-too-real, all-too-known, heavy, snor-
ing husband, (The bachelor never snores in the fancy of
this lady.) Or she knows he is lonely and she sees a sweet

. 34 .

THE BACHELOR'S DILEMMA 35 *

lost lad to be comforted. Or she sees a combination of
challenge and need. She wants to feed him, ease him of sor-
row, perhaps she tucks a tooth into her thoughtful lip
perhaps find him someone. Or, in some cases, if she and
he are crowded into a corner with their drinks in their
hands, she finds herself whispering those strange, hasty
words in that bizarre language of invitation: "Call me. Call
me. Hang up if a man answers/'

What does the husband see? He may see a lucky man
who has avoided the tender trap (a trap baited only with
hope and desire) or a man who has been able to undo
the clamps by brute force. He claps him on the back and
says, "Still got your pick of things, eh Jack?" Or he sees
a poor fellow who hasn't yet tasted the joys of children,
hearth, steady conjugal affection. Or a paltry jokester, still
trying to make out of an evening, like a fraternity boy or a
conventioneer. Or perhaps he sees a challenge and a rival.
("Funny thing keeps happening. I answer the phone and
the party on the other end hangs up.")

What does the girl see? Ah, she scents rather than sees.
She recognizes a possible catch. But if he carries the reputa-
tion of a confirmed bachelor, the girlish mind boggles
before vague threats from Sunday supplements and ancient
movies weekends at ski lodges, abrupt petulance and
shortness of mood, flowers and candy, and then echoing
silence heaped up about her while she shrivels into scorned
spinsterhood. . . . She blinks. He approaches. He has nice
teeth. He's a pleasant chap no spats, cane, or waxed
mustache. Still, she has been told that he has run through
a dozen like her, and that his gray temples may bespeak
merely an ironic heart. But I am different, she decides
bravely. Let's see, if I spread my net in front of the canap6
table, and bait it with dimples, promises of home cooking,
and "What kind of work do you do?"

What does another bachelor see? A comrade, a rival,
a friend with one button missing from his shirt, who is

* 36 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

likely to bore him with complaints and then steal his girl.

The hostess sees the available extra man. The food
table little bits of things placed upon little bits of things
sees a gobbling mouth which has skipped dinner. And
perhaps the psychiatrist sees a patient Our individual con-
firmed bachelor in his J. Press suit turns out to have about
as many identities as there are people in the room.

And what does he see when he looks into the bath-
room mirror in his studio apartment while dressing for this
party? Perhaps he sees a healthy young man with plenty
of time, money (as much as the Bureau of Internal Rev-
enue allows him to keep), opportunity, willingness for ad-
venture. He is all set and the lights are winking on and the
evening is before him. No wife will make demands; no child
will wake him later; he can eat, drink, and wander where,
when, and how he pleases; he has the initiative. He can
look over the world and take his pick and accept the chal-
lenge of fighting for her, or her, or HER. He dwells in realms
of liberal choice. He has time for everything, visions and
decisions and revisions. Showered, shaved, brushed, he
finds himself the freest man on earth, if only he be willing
to define the world narrowly and shrewdly enough.

Or he may discover somebody else in that mirror.

He stares and sees the frazzled face of the undecided
man who slides down the razor blade of time lonely,
bored, lonely, lonely, and lonely. Asked why he finally
married, one ex-bachelor said, "I got sick of that same old
face in the bathroom mirror." He is tormented by a twist-
ing loneliness which, oddly enough, feels to the belly very
much like the pain of jealousy. But here we find just one
person involved, a straight line any way you turn him, not
three people, a triangle, as in the socialized pain of jealousy.
He has less to contemplate; he has only his solitary, re-
tracted state. The bachelor often suffers from indigestion
and incipient ulcers. Too much restaurant food? Pans not
clean enough? Or was the restaurant good but the interior

THE BACHELOR'S DILEMMA 37 -

monologue accompanying dinner stewed in unfriendly
juices? He knows that all the statistics give him a shorter
life expectancy practical thought than that of married
men. Despite his naps, his self-indulgence, his cheerful ac-
ceptance of the haphazard, he dies young.

There is a law that a battery must be charged or it
will be exhausted. It cannot generate from itself. The
bachelor is a battery trying to charge itself.

In nature there is another parallel. A certain primitive
variety of one-celled creature reproduces by what is called
"binary fission" by simply splitting in two. It requires
no other, no mate. There appears to be nothing like sex
needed. However, scientists notice under the microscope
that a culture of these paramecia soon becomes "tired,"
"sluggish," and inactive, reproducing more and more
slowly. Unless . . . and here is the curious detail. If the
creature does not occasionally swim up to another like
it, move alongside and exchange nuclei for a reason which
has no normal mechanical explanation, it will finally slow
down absolutely, disintegrate, die. But if it does perform
this mysteriously friendly act, it will regain strength, move
and feed with healthy vigor, and renew its process of re-
production by binary fission with elegant enthusiasm.

Which leads us back to the confirmed bachelor and
a delicate matter. He is not a boy. He is not a child. It is
no secret: one of his major problems is sex, and this fact
fills a large part of his life and has obvious repercussions on
the lives of all the people around him. If he is a confirmed
bachelor, the genuine article, he has no guarantees in this
area. Sex produces two kinds of trouble, and accordingly
two kinds of bachelor. One bachelor is the shrewd Don
Juan, attractive, capable, efficient, going off into the eve-
ning of his life to do battle with little black address book
in hand and perhaps a list of historical, used-up girls in a
secret drawer in his heart. He gets what he wants; but the
trouble is: he doesn't want -what he gets. He is often

38 * THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

courted by women as in that boyish dream where the re-
sponsibilities of manhood are taken over by clairvoyant
girls and he finds himself fought for as a commodity.
Especially in large cities, where there tend to be more girls
than men, he has an easy time of it. Everything works
in his favor, even statistics. One confirmed bachelor says,
"When I want to move or furnish a new apartment for
myself, I just pick a girl who knows my taste. I tell her
what I want, give her as much money as I want to spend,
and tell her go, I don't have time. She finds me what I
want."

Smug? Hard-hearted?

Perhaps, but he can point out that the girl enjoys what
she is doing. She wants to oblige; she wants to be needed,
even if only as an unpaid interior decorator. Unmarried,
without children, she is chafing to take hold. Far from
feeling exploited, she is likely to harbor a tender indulgence
for the man who trusts her so. She enjoys a brief glow
of maternal and wifely joy. Later he can move her out of
his life or inform her that she has never moved in. "I
didn't make her do anything she didn't want to do," he
says. "She could have said no. Elaine or Barbara would
have been glad to do it if she hadn't."

His friend pounds him on the shoulder. "You old
manipulator! Playing with fire! Just you wait!"

"Of course, she really didn't have to sew all those cur-
tains by hand. . . ."

And then there is the meeker, milder bachelor who,
in his secret reverie, imagines himself a conqueror of dames,
a hero in the lists of love, a brave commissioner of apart-
ments to be decorated. He has girls who sew curtains for
him in his dreams, but not during the long waking day.
What about him? He is that man who sits on the auto-
matic washer in the basement of his apartment house,
waiting for his clothes to be done a rumble in the
machine and a rumble in his heart and trying to figure

THE BACHELOR'S DILEMMA . 39

out how to pass the evening after his TV dinner and his
little stint of ironing. Later, wandering, he is one of the
ghost ships that cruise the great cities, watching, discour-
aged, gray. (If he has a sun lamp, he can cruise discouraged
and tanned,) He may be lucky. Some equally saddened,
equally hopeful girl may take pity. He may even find
himself buying love in that most paltry way spending a
few dollars for an imitation of feeling that no paramecium
would envy. More likely, he takes a couple of drinks, numbs
himself, sighs, hopes for better luck another time, and
tumbles into bed.

Are these two men so different the sleek Don Juan
in quest of his ideal, the meek Don Mitty unable to find
anything? No, they are blood brothers under the thick or
thin skin; they are both deprived. Neither can attain a state
of rest; neither has been able to settle for the possible.
Both are forever looking, forever disappointed. The earth
spins and they spin. They may buy themselves all sorts of
pleasure hi-fi, foreign travel, sports cars, the paraphernalia
of elegant consumption. They are likely to have time and
money for these tilings one can live cheaper than two.
They pamper themselves because they have no one else
to love. In the first weeks after birth, infants think of the
rest of the world as extensions of their own bodies; they
don't understand that mother's breast and father's arms
belong to separate, other persons. Like the infant, the
bachelor is in primitive contact with the world of love,
knowing only his craving, and so he remains infantile
extending his solitary body with the balm of luxury and
indulgence. He follows the rule of constant enticement,
seduction, dissatisfaction, another girl, wandering to an-
other town, another girl, another job, another ar, another
girl. And again another.

Because no one reassures him very deeply, his vanity is
inflexible it is the savage vanity of the child. In his search
for "true love," he is eternally deceived and mocked. After

40 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

the thrill of easy conquest, he asks himself once more,
"Was it really conquest? She was, after all, so much like
the others."

What does this do for the bachelor's masculine pride?
It does not help it very much, any more than scratching an
insect bite makes it stop itching. He itches more fiercely
and knows no remedy. There are few things sadder than the
success of the man who achieves all he craves, but then
discovers his inmost thought: And now what? And now?
And now?

The bachelor enacts an immense joke in which the
leg he pulls may be his own. He searches for the "true
meaning" of love, whose true meaning is that it has no
single true meaning. He may finally, like the male models
in certain advertisements, seem to be held together by little
more than his clothes and his vanity; and if they were to
let go, he would tinkle to earth in a little heap of discrete
parts. His arms enfold air, his mouth kisses glass. His present
is without a future or a past: it is only a place to store his
tubes, drops, and pills (he grows hypochondriacal with age) ;
with mysterious hope he takes vitamin E, which is said to
be for fertility. Unless he explodes, protests, cries No! no
to all that! and thus joins the harried legions of newly-
weds, forgetting his vitamins, and afterwards troubled in
other ways.

Most of the time we see only the glamour of the
bachelor's freedom. We find him dressed, preened, rested,
at his social best. He may simply age peacefully in our
sight, growing gracefully into the permanent "extra man"
for hostesses. Or he may finally be more fortunate than
most men and find the girl of his dreams, the girl out of
whose kisses he builds as a poet wrote "a ladder to the
stars." Equipped with experience and age, patience and
determination, he wins exactly what he wants. He is then
much to be envied. The prince has wandered the enchanted
forest and found his heart's perfect desire not merely

THE BACHELOR'S DILEMMA - 41

fallen out of bed and awakened groping on the cold floor.
What a lucky man! He lifts the wand and She speaks to
him. . . .

We see him during his best moments, on the verge
of that discovery, with new girls, trying.

Usually he does not find the girl of his dreams. That
ladder to the stars lies folded in a closet somewhere. An-
other evening has been spilled away with a swell kid whose
name he will soon forget.

We do not see him during those moments when he is
alone in his apartment, wondering why. Alone. Back home
alone to his cold bed, his vacant hopes, and his Dacron
shirt drying in the bathroom.

1958

The Mystery of Personality in the Novel

THE NOVELIST'S BOLDEST address to himself says: "I must
master the most powerful sense of human life on earth,
that of individual striving in a world clotted with both
trouble and joy; I mean to commit myself to love and
ambition and the frustrating of mortality/'

The timorous wee clerk within replies: "Who, you?' 9

"Yes," says the novelist, "and don't interrupt. I will
reflect the movement of men in society in order to give an
example of the glory of desire."

The inner clerk, snuffling righteously before so much
rhetoric, says: "Watch out! That's very difficult."

And so it is. And so ensues a struggle. Generally the
clerk wins. Often the dialogue is never quite argued through.
Occasionally, a few times in each generation, the novelist
wins against his other self.

In the first case there is the sleek and pure pseudo-
novelist, faking passion, faking life, the opportunist of
problems, the Herman Wouks and Sloan Wilsons and
Cameron Hawleys, with their deep affirmations for those
who admire the editorials in Life. In the second case there

42

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL 43 -

is an uneasy, unfulfilled writer, often precious, satisfied with
aspects and insights and partial comfort. And in the third
case, when the novelist never abandons his deepest hopes,
well, there is the possibility of a masterpiece. He gives us
the stories for which we hunger, rich with people we love
in mortal danger; his way of telling, his angle of vision, his
perspective this is what we mean by style give us the
judgment married to perception which defines both the
whole man and the artist Sensitive and brave at the same
time what a monster! he joins plot and perspective in a
way that finally, without exhortation, suggests a vision of
the good life.

This is the critical maximum which no individual can
reach.

But although it is more pleasant to talk of success, I
would like first to name some of the ways by which novelists
evade the possibilities of their art. They construct a man-
nered style of arbitrary perspectives, with the intention that
neither they nor their readers will be obliged to venture
into the huge mystery of personality. The aim is simple:
If you restrict your world, then the world is reduced in size
and manageable. Hide what is difficult; trim what does not
fit; make it neat. The great novelist is committed to a
world without horizons, manifested first of all by a large
and lyric sense for his heroes. The mediocre or tertiary
writer limits and limits and limits, and so we have, some-
times overlapping, the following contemporary types:

The Forthright Brutes: Ernest Hemingway and imi-
tators. They are bewitched boys, newly discovering verbs
and nouns, physical sensation, zip-pow-wham of weather,
drink, sex, war, bulls. They are too scared of what goes
on inside an intelligence, inside a memory, inside a group
of people to be able to face these matters except by smash-
ing physical symbols like fists across the page. Sometimes
they have sensitive nerves in their fists, but the nerve end-

44 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

ings are stunned before making contact with the complex
congeries of will and desire within.

Hemingway's resolution of the necessary tension of
conception in fiction can be examined in the light of the
traditional philosophical concept of Universals and Par-
ticulars. In one tradition "reality" is defined by abstract
forms outside time, and the specific ever-changing events of
our world are flickering shadows through fire on the wall
of the cave, imperfect imitations of the ideal forms. In
the other tradition, it is these particular events which are
"real," and general statements are inaccurate, merely useful
summaries of the only knowable reality the fact in the
here and now. The terms Idealism and Materialism are
approximate, somewhat misleading labels for these oppos-
ing world views.

The novel as a form is obviously empirical, working
toward whatever large statements it has to offer about men
in society, love, death, ambition, and so on, through specific
instances of a man, a love, a death, an ambition, a specific
society in a specific time and place. Not merely in general
approach but in method also the novelist tends to be
empirical. He does not say, "She was beautiful." He de-
scribes a particular lovely creature with all her lovely
attachments and gadgets, and then leaves us with one of
the formal summaries which are part of the reader's active
participation in a fiction: "Wow! Beautiful!" The novelist
seeks what T. S. Eliot has called, in a famous phrase, the
"objective correlative" of emotion.

This objectifying in Hemingway goes very far. It is as
if he were a too-literal student of some early physical scien-
tist, overskeptical about what he can learn. The abstention
from analysis, deduction, conjecture, the bold hunch
these risks which are taken by the great scientist, too in
favor of a minute noting of symptoms, has a certain ani-
mal simplicity, grace, and power. But even the most grace-
ful and powerful bull hangs from a very small head, which

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL 45

he uses mainly for battering, and little of what one bull
learns needs to be passed on to another. He has opted for
a pathetic lowering of the eyes, a doomed charge, a
sword in the heart, and an occasional chance to gore before
thumping in the dust with his life running out. El pobre
torol His head admits not enough to understanding.

A passion for objectifying emotion through physical
sensation and act spins off to mania in the lesser work of
Hemingway and in his fleas. The details become more and
more ritual; the general emotion and sense which is sup-
posed to emerge from the details has to be supplied entirely
by the reader. In its own way, this is a highly "literary"
manner, depending on knowledge of other stories, other
stages in the life of the maestro, rather than on the work
at hand itself: "It was hot He took a cigarette. It was very
hot. He took a drink. He went upstairs. Christ, it was hot."

This type of minimal statement in Hemingway goes
very far toward forgetting that thoughts, fantasies, mem-
ories, projects, the constant inner monologue and the
unspoken conversations among people are also facts in the
world, facts of being human. That we think defines our
humanity. We are remembering, reasoning, political crea-
tures, constantly responding to others and constantly
willing ourselves into relation with others. Eliminate these
actions in the guise of objective reporting and the writer
eliminates the properly human, just as at the opposite ex-
treme, in the precious and private writer, he eliminates
social meaning by signifying nothing but his own obsession.
The force of an obsession cannot be communicated; the
obsessed person clings to his loneliness. Hemingway's
compulsion toward objectivity links him with the obses-
sively subjective writer: they both fail to give us sufficient
criteria for judgment, sufficient material for a full partici-
pation in the life of large human beings. They bind their
projections of men in action to limited conceptions of the
possibilities of being human.

* 46 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

Obviously, however, Hemingway has found an ade-
quate stance for expressing the sadness of the basically
uncommunicative soul and for giving glory to its instants
of lonely courage. When he depicts the isolated man, he
knows whereof he speaks and the simplistic prose manner
which he derives from Gertrude Stein serves him well.
(He was a nice boy, a good pupil, she notes maliciously.)
He describes a static condition, not an act of becoming.
His "moments of truth" are plateaus. The consequence of
revelation is a fortified stoic acceptance of mortality. He
gives us a partial truth about the human condition.

Why then does so much of his work make us feel like
a rainy Sunday afternoon? What depresses us finally is
this vision of human possibility one of violent compart-
mentalization, strict limits, and no growth possible. On the
occasions when he seeks to express a sense of people coming
meaningfully together, he falls into an embarrassing purple
rhetoric, as in the sleeping-bag scenes of For Whom the
Bell Tolls or in the biography of the battered old love-
hungry soldier in Across the River and into the Trees. This
is not to derogate his great achievement, the one which
is responsible for his popularity and his enduring projection
of an aspect of life in the twentieth century. From begin-
ning to end, he has spun out a continuous moral romance
about the lonely man striving for dignity, grace, and com-
passion within a world populated by real sharks and imag-
inary tender boys and girls.

The Cataloguers: John O'Hara is a good example. They
observe. They make the discovery of the trivial it is most
important; in fact, even the important is merely trivial; the
trivial tells us all we need to know. They soothe us with
sociology. They lay us to rest with details of tailoring and
brand names. Their predominant cast of mind is a senti-
mental passivity toward the dead weight of facts, which are
seen quantitatively, and the contents of a closet are given

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL 47

the same loyal inventory as the two-headed contents of a
bed.

The Outer-Essence Girls: Truman Capote and the
chattering poets of decoration. A paragraph is a hammock
in which words copulate prettily. Society is a meeting of
birds on the wing. Put more formally, they do what bad
poets do: They use words as if they were things and not
signs representing acts and things. They drop the object
of narrative prose, which is to make sense about human
action, and replace it with a prettifying function. They are
interior decorators for sentences. We can't all be William
Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, or even Carson McCuI-
lers, but each and every one of us can aspire to be Speed
Lamkin.

The Daintily Involved Observers of Aspects: This is
The New Yorker fashion, although its best writers, such as
John Cheever and Robert Coates, do something more. It is
a variety of corporate prose less solemn-chuckly than the
Time-Life product, but no more able to bear the full weight
of experience. The New Yorker stylists are marvelously
shy about the world. They blush before experience, but have
learned graceful ways toward it, with shrewd notings of
intonation and the vagaries of expression. Parts stand for
wholes, although there seems to be a law of expression
the smaller the part, the larger the hole. Finally summon-
ing up their courage before fleeing, these writers offer a pox
on life in the last paragraph.

The Common-Style Fellas: Herman Wouk proudly
claims to write "the common style/' This cottony diction,
also worked with varying degrees of efficiency by Sloan
Wilson and Cameron Hawley, is the great current success.
These people are the just-plain-Bills of literature, producing
an upper-middle-class soap opera for the readers of Luce
magazines and subscribers to the Book-of-the-Month Club's
service. They love what-is, whether it be the Navy, the
suburb, or the corporation, and come forward to swear

48 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

their allegiance without quaver or quibble. There may be
some touch of nonsense in the process, for the flesh is
weak, but they rinse and bleach it all for us in the end.

It is the latter, the "common style," which enjoys the
greatest success today. By the phrase "common style" is
meant uninvolved, unambitious, "traditional" English
diction, without excesses of feeling or rhetoric, suitable to
describing the lives of people who want nothing to change,
nothing to stop, just let's all pull together, hup-two-three,
on to America's last frontier Adjustment. Those who write
the common style show us how to avoid adventure, giving
us just enough of it along the way to keep us titillated. It
is a manner of withdrawal. They use the tricks of plot to
replace action, the display of hysteria to justify emotions
treated by Equanil, the questioning of moral assumptions
in order to tell us that these questions can be avoided. The
method consists in the ejaculatio praecox of drama. Clear
out before we feel something! The result here too, of course,
is a safe but jaded withdrawal from feeling, which is seen
as dangerous. (Passion builds and renews only after we have
submitted to it utterly.)

The artisans of the common style often, like all good
engineers, borrow techniques. Particularly they have mas-
tered the cataloguing skill; occasionally they seem for para-
graphs at a time almost as delicate as the New Yorker
stylists; more rarely they imitate a Hemingway growl or a
Capote fruitiness. But they turn these methods to their
own ends, and go plodding on through their scenarios for
adjustment. Flat-footed sentence dogs flat-footed sentence;
limp paragraph folds into limp paragraph; the rhythm of
phrase prepares us for the denouement, which is a cal-
culated marriage, a comfortable job, a saving of the com-
pany.

Form follows function.

The function is to assure us that the lowest common

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL 49 -

denominator of personality and experience is all we need.
The common-style artisans give us an ideal of comfortable
conforming ways. The package is all wrapped up and
ready to wear, in fact, as easy as old shoes.

The mysterious longing of individuals to create and
renew is excised with an almost surgical brutality and pre-
cision although funnily enough, the American reader can
teach these writers much about that of which the novelist
is supposed to have special knowledge. American readers
are drinkers and sometimes addicts; Americans love jazz
and fast driving and secluded corners; with all the itch to
conform, Americans are still trying to burst the bonds of
isolation by various sorts of violent experiences, including
art.

Why then do so many readers find comfort in the dry
apotheosis of Marjorie Morningstar's frigidity? How can
Sloan Wilson get away with a billion copies of his pettish
smugness in the job, the house, the rich aunt, the old
wartime affair "talked out" between husband and wife?
The great novelists have always given us, before anything
else, before all morality and sociology, a sense of the rich-
ness of possibility. Why do so many novelists fear the mys-
tery of personality?

Well, first of all, they always have. Besides, life is hard
enough without going out looking for challenges. In an
impoverished time, palliated by plenty but worried all the
same, there is a generalized loss of the sense for creative
activity. Nothing more than anxiety inhibits the power to
do, to make, to invent, to admit. When your belly is con-
stricted by worry, oatmeal goes down most comfortably.
Novelists are human beings more than they are anything
else. The mystery of personality is a mystery: isolation,
incomprehension, brusque flashes of lightning, cold and hot,
danger, danger, danger. To enter into a dark place involves
the risk of coming out where you won't see things as they
were. In novels as in life, we cannot eliminate emotion ut-

SO THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

erly and remain human; but we can replace deep involve-
nents by passing safely from the stage of titillation to that
}f being jaded without crossing through commitment. We
ive this way, we write these books, we read them in order
to say: I'm safe, I really cm, and I'm pleased about it!
(We keep on renewing the experience because secretly we
are not pleased.) Thus Sloan Wilson can declare that his
novel expresses his sense for a world which has treated him
"pretty well" wars, bombs, a third of a nation watching
Ed Sullivan, all of it. Better forget about adventuring,
he means to say; better accept a stereotyped image of desire;
better be attentive to the media and take the profit in sub-
sidiary rights.

The novel at its best is a large perspective on life in
society large because the hero's doings are important
and because the novelist is deeply concerned with the
careers of his people. Ulysses, for example, has difficulties
of manner, but is not in its conception hermetic. Leopold
Bloom is a representative, poignant, and troubling instance
of city-dwelling man; his fretting and wandering in Dublin
bring to us the challenge and limitations of our own in-
telligence, ambition, and ability to love. James Joyce's per-
sonal voice here is many-focused, as true personality always
is, not the pale self-contemplation, blank and onanistic,
which the seventeen-year-old thinks of as the pursuit of
himself; nor is it the cruelly partial view of the writer fleeing
his largest intelligence. It is a lyric reverie in the light of
the wide world of society.

What is that grit out of a unique individual which
somehow provokes the novel of largest general significance?
The nature of the writer's involvement with his material
(which consists of all that he knows of life) suggests another
clue. For complex psychological reasons, many novelists have
been unavowed Platonists, philosophical idealists, possessed
of a spectator theory of reality. That is, life has meaning

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL * 51 -

as the shadows on Plato's cave have meaning as flickering
glimpses through fire of something beyond life, something
perfect and unchanging and finally unknowable by men.
Their world is a system deduced from unknown premises.
Unknown this paradox torments them. How can deduc-
tions be made without defined terms? Therefore they look
for moral abstractions, categories, faiths, anything that can
place them outside the tormenting flux of time and sen-
suality. Perhaps they become doctrinaire religionists or
Marxists. They take their stand as viewers, as unwinders.
What is the effect on their novels? Well, some of these
writers are great ones, like Proust and Henry James, en-
gaged in enterprises of passive integration in order to give
some "symbolic" sense to the unruly factness of life. They
shrink; still they cannot avoid rendering this dense, com-
bative, time-ridden teeming. Despite their static position,
Proust and James at their best project a moving image of
desire.

But in anything less than a master, the type of self-
absorption in moody fantasies is crippling. We may be
hypnotized by it; we all have deep impulses to passivity
before the fright of time; but an aspiration to perfection
expressed as static clutching leads finally to paralysis. We
stiffen; we are isolated. Platonism here parallels what the
psychoanalysts call "fixation" a retreat to impossibly per-
fect and unchanging gratifications or frustrations. We
sneeze, we wheeze, our bodies protest

Let us now set the empirical novelist against the deduc-
tive one. "Love" is not an abstraction to be encompassed
by definition: it is this Jack and Jane, that Bud and Joy
look and see! The novelist is not studying shadows for some
ultimate reality beyond earth; he accepts that the shadows
themselves give him all that he can know; in fact, that they
are enough; in fact, they are not shadows they are thick
reality itself and a marvel to behold.

There is the lesson of a Welsh phrase: "The rent that's

52 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

due to love" you must pay and pay and pay, relentlessly
giving yourself and making others give, too. The category
"Love" does not exist; it can be merely rented, never owned;
it is unpossessable in any final way. Like the medieval cathe-
dral, like a child, like love, the great novel gives a sense of
not yet completed life within whatever its perfections of
design. Attempting to offer the sense of life, a novel is always
in process. You can't step in the same story twice. When
the writer sits down to his desk in the morning, there is
nothing so safe and deadly as knowing exactly what comes
next. If he is a real novelist by temper of imagination, but
weakly hopes to have the security of a controlled symmetry,
he will find that his characters shake their fists into the
crooks of their elbows, set his schemes on their tails, ruth-
lessly rewrite him. All that he is makes his people all that
they are, but they are endowed with the kind of indepen-
dence which defiant children have when they leave a good
home. Fortified by their parents to make their own way,
they are most loyal in being most free.

The mystery of personality can be defined again and
again, and then redefined: that's what mysteries are for. A
jittery scientist has defined personality as "the index of in-
efficiency." Machines are both efficient and free of caprice,
he assures himself; therefore personality is a negative quan-
tity with respect to intention, plan, goals; therefore the ideal
of Science must be the elimination of personality in favor
of socially governed ends. How are the ends to be deter-
mined? By what criteria are they judged? By the efficient,
impersonal needs of the smoothly running society. Needs?
Needs? Why, for Plato's sake, pal, that's more circular (in
logical terms) and hysterical (in psychological lingo) than
any aesthetic rant

Personality is prickly against definition. Let us return
to the novel. In novels the mystery will make itself manifest
as an individual, unsocialized perception, compassion,

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL 53 *

hatred, and love a congeries of unique relationships with
unique creatures and events. Despite the difficulties of defi-
nition, we know that the lonely, self-devouring ego is not
personality and neither is the busy radar-flaunting opportun-
ist: they are both flights from that mystery. They are willed,
not willing; worked on, not working. They are not mysteri-
ous, either: they are explainable products. They can be
comic and pathetic, even typical of a society never heroic,
tragic, or representative of aspiration (which is also a part
of the twentieth century archetype) .

However, the man moving in consciousness and con-
templation of his will really conscious and watching, really
moving and committed is the personality capable of defin-
ing freedom for all of us. His is the will which, in type,
reaches to the divine maximum, where God made something
from nothing, the heavens and earth popping out of his pride
in six days, not seven on the seventh day He gloated. At a
slightly less monstrous level, Balzac created Pere Goriot
in fifty-eight days, complete with Vautrin swarming over
Rastignac's soul. Love, ambition, power under the sun of
mortality! These are the issues; the great heroes of fiction
meet their risks head-on, as we all must do, but too often
we do it also faces down.

The novelist must reach for the grown-up, risking,
athletic personality, surely must in some way be this person,
in order to find a hero who gives the sense of men at their
best on earth: and catch him finally where his great gifts
do not suffice: this is tragedy. American life is rich in sug-
gestions of tragic themes: The man in politics is cracked by
his ambition but really involved, not floating above pol-
itics; the man in business fails against the fierce appetite of
the devouring business world but really struggling and
pretty fierce himself while not mistaking the business world
for the whole of life; the lover is lost by love, as it is perhaps
still possible to be, but by a love which is health and desire
for a woman worth desiring and defeated by the natural

54 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

strangeness of human beings. It would not be stretching
the essential definition of tragedy to show the possibilities
of individual triumph in all these struggles.

Personality is a key, not a twitch.

Without personality, manifested by what is called style,
there is no significant touching.

Personality in the novel leads to communion with
others, a meaningful individual participation in the com-
mon career. Otherwise, despite all brilliance, emotion is
reduced to the self-loathing of a Celine or the self-aggran-
dizement of the cripple perspectives mentioned earlier. The
individual is more than the common style's stock-figure
cartoon of Everyman in gray flannel. And of course the
individual is more than the cracked-up romantic poet at
three o'clock in the morning in the dark night of his soul.

We should expect the fragmentation of self in the
modern novel, just as we expect it in the man bound to a
factory or office, within a social structure which cannot
use the largest capacities of millions of individuals. Writers
are responsive people: the complexities of being an Amer-
ican in 1957 are enough to tempt all of us to turn to partial,
limited, maybe soothing half-views. What a dangerous thing
to be all present and awake before the front page of the
daily newspaper!

Can some novelists stand up against their confusion
and fright?

Yes, and even with courage, humor, and a will to do
good work. Without naming specific writers, I suggest
that the contemporary American novel is still tihe best place
to look for instances of lives which seek to be whole
and unafraid. Confidence and freedom of style are good
signs of a writer's taking the chance. A style which at-
tempts to use all a writer knows to tell all he can imagine
involves a moral stance in favor of intelligence and liberty
and risk-taking. With their varying defects and capacities,

MYSTERY OF PERSONALITY IN THE NOVEL 55

such writers have this in common: they are individuals,
not products; they are making a way, not accepting a
road; they do not flinch before the mystery of personality,
or when they do, they give signs of knowing that there
is something vital left out. Their failures are peculiarly
ungracious: they intend otherwise. They will try again
next time.

At its best, the art of the novel tells us more than we
can find out elsewhere about love and death. We com-
mune together before a guiding image of the always un-
fulfilled possibilities of life on earth. We are therefore in
continual need of the dangerous, destructive moralist which
the great novelist is.

1957

The Fair Apple of Progress

1. "A Little Worm in the Fair Apple of Progress"

HE SAID IT OF HIMSELF. He saw himself curled up, busily
feeding on midwestern America, sheltered, destructive,
loving his host, and needed by this age and place in order
that they could get some sense of buoyancy and carry
within them the richness of growth. He recognized his own
childish self-absorption, great even for an artist, a breed
accused by everyone of being childishly self-absorbed.
Therefore he wrote about death with praise because "it
will in any case give us escape from this disease of self/'
Self-love is surely the beginning of the love of others, but
it is only the beginning. Sherwood Anderson, an old child,
suffered a merely erratic love of himself, therefore writhed
with a tormented love of others. All his stories are bound
up in this sense of the self's isolation, seen as glory and
sickness, as sickness and glory. He is one of the purest,
most intense poets of loneliness the loneliness of being
an individual and of being buffeted in the current, the
loneliness of isolation and that of being swallowed. One

56-

THE FAIR APPLE OF PROGRESS 57

type represents the traditional retreat into the self for self-
possession; the other, and its adversary at times, arises out
of the angry resentment of a sensible man in an assembly-
line civilization. Anderson's work is a manual of the wavs

*

in which loneliness can be used. It was his nourishment
and sometimes his poison.

"I pour a dream over it ... I want to write beautifully,
create beautifully, not outside but in this thing in which
I am bom, in this place where, in the midst of ugly towns,
cities, Fords, moving pictures, I have always lived, must
always live." Yet he fled it always. He fled in order to find
himself, then prayed to flee that disease of self, to become
"beautiful and clear . . . plangent and radiant/ 7 He felt that
he loved only the midwestern land and people, but was still
fleeing when he died in the Panama Canal Zone.

In his photographs he often showed his hair hanging
over his eyes. The affectation means a great deal: first mere
arty affectation (how he loved the "free spirits" of Green-
wich Village and New Orleans!), then something feminine
an4. wanting to be pretty and lovable for prettiness, and then
of course the blurring of sight when you try to see through
your own hair. What do you see? A world organized by
your hair. "I must snap my finger at the world. . . .
I have thought of everyone and everything." His sympathy
and his oceanic feelings alternate with arrogant despair in
which the arrogance can deceive no one. So desperately
hurt he is, trying so hard to convince the "word-fellows" he
wanted to admire him. But then his nostalgia gives us the
mood he sought to force: ". . . old fellows in my home town
speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big, empty
plains. It has taken the shrillness out of them. They had
learned the trick of quiet. It affected their whole lives. It
made them significant"

We understand him at last!

And then again the helpless bombast: "At my best,
brother, I am like a great mother bird. . . ." He exuded

58 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

through his pores the ferocious longing of a giant of lone-
liness. The typical chords from his letters sound under the
changing heroes of the stories:

Youth not given a break youth licked before it starts.
Filled with sadness that you weren't there.

I have a lot I want to tell you if I can. . . . Anyway
you know what I mean when we talked of a man
working in the small, trying to save a little of the
feeling of man for man.

The romantic sentimentalist held up his mirror to look
at his world, peered deeply, saw himself instead, of course;
wrote painfully about what he saw; and it turned out that
he was writing about the world after all, squeezing it by
this palpitating midwestern honesty out of his grandiose
sorrows and longings. Sometimes, anyway. He was not a
pure man; he had a kind of farmer cunning, plus his groan-
ing artmess and pretense, with which he hoped to convince
the "word-fellows" and the pretty girls that he was a Poet
although not a young one. What he really wanted was to
be alone in that succession of gray furnished rooms he
talked about so eloquently, making immortal the quiet
noise and gentle terror of his childhood. "I try to believe
in beauty and innocence in the midst of the most terrible
clutter." But clutter too was the truth of his life; he fed
on it; how else does a poet take the measure of his need
for "beauty and innocence"? He must have remained an
optimist, too, amidst all his disillusion. He married four
times. To the end of his life he went on believing, and
marrying.

Anderson the writer arouses a poking curiosity about
Anderson the man even in the most resolutely detached
critic. The note of confession is always with us: Here I
am, it's good that you know! he seems to be saying.

His most formal narrative paragraphs are soaked in his

THE FAIR APPLE OF PROGRESS 59

own groping speech. He repeats, he cries out, he harangues,
he pleads. All his work, the absymal failures and the suc-
cesses which have helped to construct the vision Americans
have of themselves, represents an innocent, factitious, im-
provised, schemed reflection and elaboration of the elements
of his own life. He turns the private into the public and then
back into the private again. His mystery as a man remains
despite his childish longing to reveal himself the mystery
of a man who looks at a man with a beard and a scar
in a conference room and sees, instead, a lover fleeing his
girl's brothers through the fields. (They had knives and
slashed could this be the same man? he asks himself.)
Anderson confounds us with bombast and wit, tenderness
and softheadedness, rant and exquisite delicacy.

The best of his work is what matters.

Let us now look more closely at what the worm made
of his apple.

2. "My Feet Are Cold and Wet"

He loved to create, he loved his fantasy as the lonely
boy does. In his best work, as in some of the stories of
Winesburg, Ohio, the fantasy is most controlled, or if not
exactly controlled, simplified, given a single lyrical line.
The novels had trouble passing the test of the adult imag-
ination, being wild proliferations of daydream. The simple
stories of Kate Swift ("The Teacher") or Wing Biddle-
baum ("Hands") join Sherwood Anderson with the reader's
sense of wonder and despair at the pathetic in his own
past childish hope of love, failed ambition, weakness and
loneliness. As music can do, such stories liberate the fan-
tasies of our secret lives. However, musicians will agree
that music is for listening, not to be used as a stimulus
for fantasy. We must attend to the song itself, not take
advantage of it and make it the passive instrument of our
dreaming. In the same way, the great writers hope to arouse

60 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

and lead the reader's imagination toward a strong indi-
vidual perspective on experience. Sherwood Anderson, how-
ever, was not of that vividly individualistic company, despite
his personal hobby of eccentric bohemianism. Rather, he
was the dreamy, sad romantic within each of us, evoking
with nostalgia and grief the bitter moments of recognition
which have formed him formed all of us in our lonely
America.

James Joyce used the word epiphany, which he took
from Catholic ritual, to name that moment of revelation
when words and acts come together to manifest something
new, familiar, timeless, the deep summation of meaning.
The experience of epiphany is characteristic of great litera-
ture, and the lyric tales of Anderson give this wonderful
rapt coming-forth, time and time again.

In "The Untold Lie/' for example, two men tenderly
meet in order to talk about whether one, the younger,
should marry the girl he has made pregnant The older
man, unhappy in his own marriage, wants to see the young
man's life free and charged with powerful action as his
own has never been. But it is revealed to him revelation
is almost always the climax of Anderson's stories that life
without wife and children is impossible and that one man's
sorrows cannot be used by him to prevent another man
from choosing the same sorrows. It would be a lie to say
that the life of conjugal sorrows is merely a life of conjugal
sorrows: the story finally breathes the sadness, the beauty,
the necessary risks of grown-up desire. "Whatever I told
him would have been a lie," he decides. Each man has to
make his own decisions and live out his chosen failures of
ideal freedom.

Many of Anderson's stories take for their realization
objective circumstances which have a grandiose folkish
quality, and many of both the most impressive and the
most mawkish are concerned with an archetypical experi-
ence of civilization: the test which, successfully passed,

THE FAIR APPLE OF PROGRESS - 61

commands manhood. Such a story as "The Man Who
Became a Woman" objectifies even in its title the boy's
wondering and fearful dream. The end sought is manliness,
that new clean and free life; failure is seen as a process
of being made effeminate, or falling into old patterns of
feeling and action. At his best in these stories, there is a
physical joy in triumph which is fresh, clean, genial we
think of Mark Twain, although a Twain without the
robust humor; at his weak moments, we may also think of
the sentimental sick Twain, and we find also the maunder-
ing moping of a prettified Thomas Wolfe.

The line between the subjects of Anderson's stories
and Sherwood Anderson himself is barely drawn. His rela-
tion as artist to his material, as shaper of his material, is
as intense and personal as that of any modern writer. Unlike
most writing dealing with unhappy and frustrated people,
Anderson's work is absolutely authentic in the double
sense not merely in communicating the feeling of these
people as people, but also in giving us the conviction that
the author shares both their bitter frustration and their
evanescent occasional triumphs. By comparison with Sher-
wood Anderson, Dostoevski is a monument of cool detach-
ment. His identification is perfect, sometimes verging on
the morbid: "Everyone in the world is Christ and they
are all crucified." He has a primitive idealism, a spoiled
romanticism like that of Rousseau: we could be all inno-
cent and pure in our crafts if the machines of America and
the fates that bring machines did not cripple us.

This romantic idealism can be illustrated again by his
treatment of another theme, marriage, in the story "Lone-
liness," in which he writes of Enoch Robinson: "Two chil-
dren were born to the woman he married," just as if they
did not happen to Robinson at all, which is indeed the
truth about the self-isolated personality he describes. "He
dismissed the essence of things," Anderson can write, "and
played with realities." Again the romantic Platonist sees

62 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

a conflict between the deepest meaning and the fact of our
lives, between what we do and what we "really" are. With
a kind of purity and cunning, Anderson seems to thrive
on this curiously boyish notion the limitations of which
most of us quickly learn. We work and love because we
know that there is no other way to be ourselves than in
relation to the rest of the world. The kind man is the man
who perform kind acts; the generous man is a man who
behaves generously; we distrust the "essential" generosity
which is sometimes claimed for the soul of a man who
selfishly watches out only for himself. And yet we can be
reminded with a strange force by Anderson's conviction in
his boyish dream of isolated personality that there is some-
thing totally private, untouchable, beyond appearance and
action, in all of us. The observation is a familiar one, but
the experience can be emotionally crucial. Cunningly
Anderson makes us turn to ourselves again with some of
his own purity.

The last sentence of "Departure" says of George Wil-
lard: "Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had
become but a background on which to paint the dreams of
his manhood." Abstracted people, playing out their time
in the fragmentary society of Winesburg, these "heroes"
are isolated, as Anderson himself was isolated, by art or
unfulfilled love or religion by the unsurmounted challenge
of finding the self within relationship with others. It was
the deep trouble of Anderson's own life that he saw his
self, which could be realized only by that monstrous thing,
the Life of Art, as flourishing in opposition to decent con-
nections with others in society. Marriage, work, friendship
were beautiful things; but the gray series of furnished slum
rooms, in which he wrote, enough rooms to fill a city, were
his real home. Writing letters and brooding behind his
locked door, he idealized love, he idealized friendship. He
withdrew to the company of phantom creatures. He hoped
to guard his integrity. He kept himself the sort of child-

THE FAIR APPLE OF PROGRESS 63

man he described with such comprehending sympathy in
the character of Enoch Robinson.

In many writers dealing with the grim facts of our
lives, the personal sense of triumph at encompassing the
material adds a note of confidence which is at variance with
the story itself. Hemingway is a good example; his heroes
go down to defeat, but Papa Hemingway the chronicler
springs eternal. In Anderson this external note of confidence
and pride in craft is lacking, except in some of the specious,
overwilled novels which he wrote under political in-
fluences. Generally he does not import his poetry into the
work he allows only the poetry that is there nor does
his independent life as a creator come to change the tone
of these sad tales. The stories of Winesburg are unself-
consciously committed to him as he is sworn true to them;
the identification a variety of loyalty is torturingly com-
plete; he is related to his material with a love that lacks
esthetic detachment and often lacks the control which
comes with that detachment They are practically unique
in this among modern storytelling, and it is partially this
that gives them their sometimes embarrassing, often tor-
menting and unforgettable folk quality. Still they are not
folk tales but, rather, pseudo folk tales. The romantic long-
ing and grieving is not characteristic of the folk tale, despite
the other elements, a direct matter-of-fact storytelling,
colloquial American language (complicated by chivalry
and the Bible, but at its best not "literary"), and the
authority of Anderson's priestly devotion to his lives and
people. Later, of course, the romantic judgment culminated
in rebellion, sometimes in a kind of esthetic rant against
the way things are.

In 'The Strength of God/' the Reverend Curtis Hart-
man (as in a parable, Heart-man) "wondered if the flame
of the spirit really burned in him and dreamed of a day
when a strong sweet current of power would come like a
great wind into his voice and his soul and the people

64 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

would tremble before the spirit of God made manifest in
him. 'I am a poor stick and that will never really happen
to me/ he mused dejectedly, and then a patient smile lit
up his features. *Oh well, I suppose I'm doing well enough/
he added philosophically/*

These, as The New Yorker would put it, are musings
that never got mused and philosophic additions that never
got philosophically added. They have a curious archaic
directness that amounts to a kind of stylization. The un-
analytic simplicity itself is a sophisticated manner. As the
officer of the Pharisees said, "Never man spake like this
man." It recalls to us the day of the storyteller who sug-
gested the broad line of an action, and allowed us to give
our imaginations to it. Nowadays we demand detail upon
detail, and the phrase "I am a poor stick" would require
a chapter of exposition in the hands of a typical contem-
porary novelist.

The pathos of the pious man's temptation by the flesh
has a flavor beautifully evocative of adolescence. We no
longer think of "carnal temptation" as Anderson did. But
we remember our fears and guilts, and are reminded of
ourselves as great literature always reminds us. Hartman's
silent, secret battle with himself over Kate Swift is given
part of its bite by her own story this pimply, passionate
young schoolteacher who strikes beauty without knowing
it and can find no one to speak to her. Her story is told
with a brilliant delicacy that reflects Anderson's own
reticence about women. Enoch Robinson, he says, "tried
to have an affair with a woman of the town met on the
sidewalk before his lodging house." To have an affair is
his strange idiom for a pickup! (The boy got frightened, and
ran away; the woman roared with laughter and picked up
someone else.)

Except for the poetic schoolteacher and a very few
others, women are not women in Anderson's stories. There
are the girls who suffer under the kind of sensitivity, passion,

THE FAIR APPLE OF PROGRESS * 65 -

and lonely burning which was Anderson's own lot; and
then there are the Women. For Anderson women possess
holy power; they are earth-mothers, ectoplasmic spirits,
sometimes succubi, rarely individual living creatures. In
"Hands" they are not girls but "maidens/' where the word
gives a quaint archaic charm to the creature who taunts
poor, damned, lonely Wing Biddlebaum. The berry-picking
"maidens" gambol while the boys are boisterous," and
the hero flutters in his tormented realm between the sexes.
In somewhere like Wing Biddlebaum's tormented
realm, Sherwood Anderson also abode. American cities, as
he wrote, are "noisy and terrible," and they fascinated him.
He got much of the noise and terror into his writing about
big cities, and the quiet noise and gentle terror of little
towns into his stories about them. And among the fright
of materialistic life, he continually rediscovered the minor
beauties which made life possible for him the moment
of love, of friendship, of self-realization. That they were
but moments is not entirely the fault of Anderson's own
character.

3. "The Air of a Creator. 99

Anderson is shrewd, sometimes just, and has earned
the right to even the unjust judgments he makes of other
writers. How earned them? He was constantly fighting
through both the questions of craft and the deeper risks of
imagination. He has won the right to make sweeping pro-
nouncements on his peers. Of Sinclair Lewis, for example,
he offers the most damning, most apt criticism: "Wanting
to see beauty descend upon our lives like a rainstorm, he
has become blind to the minor beauties our lives hold/'
Sherwood Anderson wants the same thing, but holds to
the good sense which a poet can still have in a difficult
time: he clings to the minor beauties which give tenderness
to his longing, a hope of something else to his despair. For

66 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

this reason Anderson's critique of America finally bites
more deeply than the novels of the ferocious sentimental
satirist who was his contemporary.

Of Henry James, Anderson wrote that he is a man who
"never found anyone to love, who did not dare love. . . .
Can it be that he is the novelist of the haters? Oh, the
thing infinitely refined and carried far into the field of
intellectuality, as skillful haters find out how to do." The
Jamesian flight from direct fleshly feeling offended Ander-
son. James objectified, stipulated, laid bare, and then
suffused his entire yearning personality over all his work,
so that Isabel Archer and Hyacinth Robinson are, really
are Henry James, in all his hopeless longing, and yet spirit-
ualized, that is, without body, epicene as James seems to
have made himself in real life. George Santayana believed
that by withholding love from a specific object it could be
given "in general" to the whole world. This is a curiously
commercial, economical notion the idea that there is a
limited amount of love and that we have the choice of
spending it on a few selfishly chosen objects or distributing
it generally. "In general" we know that this is nonsense; our
attachments to individuals are the models for our attach-
ments to humanity as an ideal; but like many sorts of
nonsense, it worked for Henry James to the extent that he
really loved some spirit of Art which his "puppets," his
"fables," as he called them, served.

Is Anderson, with all his mid-American distrust of
intellectualized love, really so far from Henry James? He
is strikingly the perpetual adolescent in love with love
rather than with a specific girl with changing flesh. One can
see him dreaming after his dream-girl even as he ap-
proached old age. His romantic chivalry, his lust for the
proletariat, his fantastic correspondence in which the letters
seem to be written to himself, no matter how touching
their apparent candor and earnest reaching out is he
perhaps the other side of the coin of his accusation against

THE FAIR APPLE OF PROGRESS 67

Henry James? To be the novelist of lovers who did not dare
to hate this too is a limitation. He seems obliged to love
others as a function of his own faulty self-love, and there-
fore his love of others seems willed, therefore incomplete,
and his moments of hatred seem a guilty self-indulgence.
He presents an extreme case of the imperfections of an artist
just because of the disparity between his intentions and his
performance. He wanted to love, he wanted to sing of love.
His failures help to make still more brilliant his achieve-
ments in certain of the stories of Winesburg, in "The Egg/'
and in scattered paragraphs, stories, and sections of novels.

For the fault of bookish derivations for his feelings,
Anderson substituted at his worst the fault of self-indul-
gent derivation from gratifications and dreads never altered
after boyhood. He carried his childhood like a hurt warm
bird held to his middle-aged breast as he walked out of his
factory into the life of art The primitive emotions of
childhood are the raw material of all poetry. Sometimes the
indulgence of them to the exclusion of the mature per-
spectives of adult life prevents Anderson from equaling his
aspiration and own best work.

But this is a vain quibble. Who can do his best work
always? What counts is the achievement, not the failures,
however exemplary they may seem to a critic. "I have a
lot I want to tell you if I can/' he wrote in a letter. "I am
writing short stories." The faults of unevenness, egotism,
lazy acceptance of ideals, and romantic self-glorification are
as nothing against the realized works of art which force
their way through. Sherwood Anderson "added to the con-
fusion of men," as he said of the great financiers and
industrialists, the Morgans, Goulds, Camegies, Vander-
bilts, "by taking on the air of a creator." He has helped
to create the image we have of ourselves as Americans.
Curtis Hartman, George Willard, Enoch Robinson, all of
the people of Winesburg, haunt us as do our neighbors,
our friends, our own secret selves which we first met one
springtime in childhood. 1957

The New Upper-Middle Soap Opera

(A tribute to Herman Wouk, Sloan Wilson, Cameron
Hawley, and makers of fine face cream everywhere]

A NEW POPULAR NOVEL is abroad in the land. Like man}
a dull child, it has respectable parents: J. P. Marquand
in this generation, William Dean Howells in an earlier one :
and so on back. In its present best-selling incarnation, it
has found a formula for success to equal Aristotle's stern
definition of the nature of tragedy. No longer need a fic-
tion lift its audience to a sense of participation in the life
of a man of dignity, faced by responsibility, significant
choice, and the flaws of his own humanity. Ambition and
desire, the fear of passing away and the hunger for love,
the use of intelligence toward a passionate growth these
strong melodies have been reorchestrated by the fabricators
of the new upper-middle soap opera, just as the music is
eliminated from music on Tin Pan Alley (while preserving
a boom of beat) and caffeine is eliminated from coffee b}
the white-coated scientists (for the sake of those of us
who have the jitters because we lack the ability to fulfil
ambition and desire).

68

THE NEW UPPER-MIDDLE SOAP OPERA - 69

As we are seen in the upper-middle soap opera,
Americans no longer seek the girl, the adventure, the career,
or the prize of self. Now we need to get the Belongingness.
Groupy man is the New American. Faith, defined as trust
in a given society, becomes the prime mover. Plot, a direc-
tion of growth in time, a movement made possible by
significant risks and commitments, gives way to plot de-
fined as an anthology of cautionary anecdotes. The hero
learns just how right it is to be right. Already secure in
advance, a reader watches the protagonist join the company
of men by the curious process of getting to be at one
with the reader's own moral evasions.

In Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit,
for example, Tom Rath confesses that "Ralph and a good
deal of the rest of the world have seemed honest to ine
ever since I became honest with myself. . . . I've become
almost an optimist." The purging of pity and fear is re-
placed by contented anticipation: "Just wait till you see
Gregory Peck getting honest with himself in this one!"

Was tragedy once an occasion for communion, a time
for men to join their fellows in a sense of the power and
glory of being human? Now a stupor of pleased submission
after a term of grief, savantly drawn out follows the
difficulties put upon this new hero in his world of real
quirks and semi-real tribulations. We recognize the true
enemies of success, since we have already conquered them
ourselves: unfortunate accidents or temporary blindness.
In this new shape of democracy, we are more than the
equal of the heroes of our novels: we are the purged and
cured toward whom they aspire. They want admittance.

Who are the fashioners of the new soap opera?

Herman Wouk, or Nobody Here But Us Career
Sailors; Sloan Wilson, or Tell Your Wife the Truth, Then
Wear Even Gray Flannel Lounging Pajamas; Cameron
Hawley, or The Passion According to Saint Luce; and a
host of less subtle apes of Marquand, or How Sad To Be
Sad But How Distinguished.

70 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

From these moralists we learn that Queeg wouldn't
have been so paranoid if only that bunch of anarchists and
landlubbers had tried to understand Navy tradition and
been more sympathetic when he clacked those queegballs.
Missus Gray Flannel will understand her hubby's straying,
picnicking with the grateful, pneumatic Maria, and father-
ing a child in Rome just give her a few pages for being
agitated in the suburban garden. The Young Designer,
who really has faith in the Company, will always win out
over mean, money-loving accountants, partly because he
is Close to the Men and partly because his wife marches by
his side some of the time. In Executive Suite the moment
of truth is a moment of sublime obfuscation:

"As her hand touched the offered glass, Mary Walling
understood, for one fleeting instant, the miracle of her
husband's mind. Now it had happened to her! She knew
without knowing why she knew. . . /' Even more stirring,
she knows without knowing -what she knows. But she real-
izes: "You'll never understand completely .... don't try
.... you'll be happier if you don't .... he'll be happier,
too." And then they go down "the dark corridor" together.

Despite mechanical construction and brazen moral-
izing, their thoughts about happiness separated by dot-dot-
dot-dot from their thoughts about understanding, these
novels are neither crude nor tasteless except in their impli-
cations. They are written by intelligent men. There is an
educated restraint about their language. They are sincere
writers who mean what they say: It's so hard to conform,
but do it, do it, do it. The simplicity of the message is re-
quired by both their own lack of courage and that of the
audience, but they are capable of spinning out complica-
tions, alternatives, dilemmas, and even the ambiguity of
interpretation which passes for artistic quality. This high-
type, college-grad, sob-and-smug story, written in the cot-
tony "common style," has the advantage of making stops
and starts without ever introducing passion or will. Per-

THE NEW UPPER-MIDDLE SOAP OPERA * 71 *

f ectly planned, destined for the screen, it can be hammered
into shape with a whistle and a song in the heart, five or
seven or nine pages a day, without ever the terrible inter-
ruptions of doubt or drama. When it's time for a nap, the
author can stop in the middle of a phrase, never breaking
the easy flush and flow of his product:

"He was going to make May his wife/* Willy Keith is
relieved, also. May has just finished telling him that she
has preserved her virginity from the importunities of an
orchestra leader, she knows not why, some code or other
maybe, just an old-fashioned girl who doesn't go for or-
chestra leaders. Everyone thinks that the musician has
worked his will on May, just because she travels from hotel
to hotel with him, but surprise, surprise, he has gnashed his
teeth in vain. Willy "did not know what manner of life
they could find together, he did not know whether they
would be happy, and he did not care now. He was going
to make May his wife." In The Caine Mutiny, as elsewhere
in the woukaday world, heroes do their duty and villains
merely wish they could.

The recent history of American literary vogues is an
illuminating one. For a time, before World War II, there
was the concern about a contracting economy and want
in the midst of plenty which generated the proletarian
novel. Then came the war and the war novel, in which
the same quest for a better world met the rigors of regi-
mentation and the horrors of organized destruction. In
both of these periods, the writer reserved for himself the
role of a moralist seeking solutions beyond immolation.

But in this new novel, built within a world of terrible
beatitudes, a world of contracting freedom and organized
satisfactions, the attack is concentrated on the ideals of
the earlier writers. The novel of revolt has given way to the
obedience novel. It is cornball to be difficult, to grope for
more than a few chapters, to seek frontiers and a better
life. In the new unfreedom where all is plentiful but the

72 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

chance to look and there is nearly full employment for
everything but the mind and heart the only frontier to be
reached is that of Adjustment. These new agonists make
it to the recruiting office, or if they don't, their authors
hold them up to our contempt.

When Marjorie Morningstar attains the suburb, after
passing through the crucible of a grotesque Broadway Bo-
hemia, we are directed to cheer her luck for having found
the values that the reader has already found. She is happily
burned down. She is prematurely gray; presumably she has
charcoal gray hair to go with her gray flannel heart. As
Diderot says, commenting on the trouble we have in break-
ing the impulse to love: "Preparations of lead, put to use
prudently, may produce good effects, being proper to stifle
the venereal appetite." The leaden career of Marjorie, her
single transgression justified by frigidity on the occasion,
hip-heavy now, a clubwoman, keeping a kosher kitchen,
is given us as an exemplary one.

What are the alternatives? The Life of Art (ingre-
dients, in any order: Broadway, cynicism, the rive gauche,
sex, hope, and James Joyce) vs. The Life of Life (suburb,
bridge and canasta, a husband who is not very tall but very
nice).

Probably the most respectable rationale for this new
novel occurs in the work of David Riesman, who performed
a brilliant metaphorical fix on the American character in
The Lonely Crowd, and then proceeded, in the books that
followed, to define the desirable "autonomous" personality
as the one which is free because it accepts its society and
chooses "responsibly" within the acceptable. Why persist
in protest when we already have everything? Why look
when we have found as much as we can consume? Why
long for further goods when all the commodities needed for

THE NEW UPPER-MIDDLE SOAP OPERA - 73

happiness are available to anyone whose credit is unsullied?

And don't be anxiously other-directed, either, Mr.
Riesman advises, and we hear a peal from the church
tower prompting him: "Think positively, dong, dong."

The autonomous personality also carries a radar which
is closely tuned to others, but it makes significant and free
choices anyway. They are not the compulsive, driven ones
of the old inner-directed style; they are not the sheepish
milling in herds of the other-directeds. Most readers of
The Lonely Crowd felt a certain kinship with Riesman's
inner-directed type, and thought that he intended it that
way, despite his disavowals. Turns out that no. Further
discussion laid down the line. The Inner-directed man is a
violent, lonely, self-seeking person, tormented by aspiration,
withered of the kitchen-warm feelings, and ignorant of the
common pleasures.

For Spinoza, human bondage consists in entrapment
by the flesh and the material world; true freedom comes of
a stoic withdrawal into these personal values which no
earthly misfortune can tarnish. Riesman parodies this
typically inner-directed solution to the problem of sustain-
ing the individual spirit in troubled times. The autonomous
man seeks to be a part of the leveled culture; it would
be neurosis or treason to object. But the autonomous man
uses his teevee in a brilliant, supple, imaginative and wide-
ranging way. While mere other-directed man watches "I
Love Lucy" because everyone is watching "I Love Lucy,"
the autonomous hero deliberates, investigates, considers,
measures, and only then ventures a decision between Chan-
nel 4 and Channel 7. And of course, since we expect that
he is autonomous enough to be proud of being a man of
our time, in the end he will watch "I Love Lucy," too.

But there is always the subtle difference: He really
-wanted to. He drafted himself. And the possibilities of free
choice unroll with dizzying challenge during the autono-

74 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

mous evening: beer or ginger ale, chocolate ice cream or
strawberry, should I take my wife to bed or not.

Novelists are not the original seducers, then. They are
accompanied by Karen Horney in psychology, David Ries-
man in sociology, and Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn
in philosophy. All the current close squeezing to belong,
to conform, to adjust, to sing praise to what-is in America
provides the social climate of novels worthy of being
serialized in Life. While the society reassures itself that all
goes for the best, we are just busy little bees, working,
leisuring, grouping, rearming, the private agony goes on.
What we are and what the world seeks to make of us
are continually at war. The adman knows it, the statesman
knows it, even Sloan Wilson knows it, though he buzzes
in the hive and says, "What a brave bee am II" Exactly as
in radio soap opera, Sloan Wilson allows us our bit of
trouble to show us to what extent life can be beautiful.
Later. Soon. Just pucker up, button up, and face your duty.

The sophisticates who commit the new soap opera
know the people they describe, or at least know their man-
ners, what they drink, how they joke, where they buy their
clothes. These novelists have their own goals; they are
relieved of the wrenching ambition of Balzac, Tolstoy, or
Dostoevski to make life large. Their task is simply to
point the local personnel toward a good life waiting to re-
ceive them. You blindfold your people; you turn them
around until they are dizzy; you have them stumble awhile;
then since you know where the donkey is you let them
peek under the bandage and pin on the tail. What passes
for dramatic growth is the bumping against furniture which
dislodges that handkerchief over the eyes. The reader is
pleased that his hero has made out, but his pleasure is a
smug one. How silly not to have used a finger to pry up
the blindfold.

Determined to be a contented cow, such a novelist
is bound to give a chalky or overbland milk. There is

THE NEW UPPER-MIDDLE SOAP OPERA - 75

nothing to work toward but a job of consolidation. Social
protest is an anachronism the courts take care of injustice.
The private risk and chance of trouble are mere neurosis
find yourself an analyst. Significant choice is no longer
possible to individuals.

For these autonomous fabricators, everything can
be reduced, encompassed, rectified. We will be teased from
chapter to chapter by dread that maybe the Regular Navy
breeds the wrong kind of paranoid; maybe the man in
the gray flannel suit really has chosen a way of life which
must leave him unfulfilled and only Maria, the Roman
fantasy-wife, can make him happy in the sack; maybe great
corporations are run for profit and not for the benefit of
the worker and the customer.

But all is creamy in the end. Those who rebel against
Navy spirit are the selfish children of caprice, and an artist
is the worst of all. Now that Tom Rath and his wife
Understand, they can march on into Connecticut and the
house they really want, budgeting a hundred dollars a
month to help raise Tom's child in Rome and remembering
now to try to Communicate while they're in bed. (Balzac
said: Women, when they finally succeed in making a man
into a sheep, always tell him that he is a lion with a will of
iron.)

And finally, brightest faith of all, it turns out that a
furniture company is really a service and chooses for its
next President the man who most desires to Serve. Like
Mary Walling, the Company appreciates "the miracle of
her husband's mind."

3

Novels always reflect moral purpose. Every novel
which takes any permanent hold differs both in goal and
perspective from every other novel. We expect these dif-
ferences, just as we expect each event in a life to change

76 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

our view of that life. Novel-writing has always been a risky,
athletic, and potentially destructive adventure, for just
these reasons of uncertainty about what the work will tell
us. "Pity this busy monster, manunkind, not/'

These new novels also surprise us with their message.
There is something new in the type, however not merely
another perspective on the meaning of human life in
society. There is a new grayness and dryness, a new limit
to the will and intelligence of the novelists. They reduce
experience. They shrink; they join with the other shrinkers;
this frightened hiving replaces the challenge of individual
worth. They put alum on their lips so that they cannot
even kiss properly.

A shadow of the athletic striving of the artist as moral-
ist persists, but now the moral purpose becomes that of an
exercise in submission. Faith is the famous bird flying in
ever-decreasing concentric circles faith in Faith, not in
some bright tradition; the patriotism is hoarse and defen-
sive; groupiness replaces even the bugles of glorious chau-
vinism. Our doubts are portrayed, sometimes vividly, in the
books of Wouk, Wilson, and Hawley. They are answered
at the end much in the way of the clever Italian journalists
who smuggled honesty into their editorials, marshaling all
the arguments against Mussolini, then concluding trium-
phantly: "Oh yeah? That's what our enemies think."

The journalists deceived only the censors. Not so with
Sloan Wilson. He is a believer. After Tom Rath gives
his wife the account of his infidelity, he is suddenly that
two-headed modern fictional beast, the Honest Man. It can
do anything. By the deus ex machina of this abstract,
Platonic, "essential" honesty, he is saved for happy com-
muting despite all the evidence of his experience. Can the
heavenly purity of a gray flannel career be corrupted? No!
Why not? Because: "That's what our enemies think."

The commuting, business, institutionalized world
apolitical, bored and anxious, with passion the great danger

THE NEW UPPER-MIDDLE SOAP OPERA - 77

is questioned with some skill and tension. The affirma-
tion of allegiance to it which follows is so much more
reassuring: He knows, he knows. Job rebelling against
abomination, raises his head and cries out, "How long,
O Lord?" He needs the love of God, God's justice and
tenderness, but on his own most demanding terms: for
what he has been, is, and can be. The three friends say
Shush! because Job has no right to challenge the almighty
Source of the universe. "Hide yourself, give up/' they
urge him, waving their' arms and shaking their beards:
"There must be a reason, and if there isn't? Be nice."

He will buy neither the comfort nor the false freedom
of pretense. It is not that Job is an anarchic spoiled child.
He struggles to take his place among God's children on the
terms of his power and virtue as a man. There is belonging
and belonging. The road by which we arrive at participa-
tion within a group cannot be separated from the quality of
this participation. Community is one thing; groupiness is
another. Job stands on two feet like a man, with awareness
of responsibility, with a capacity to love and respect, with a
sense of the value of the individual others. The temporizers
band together because they cannot travel alone, and put out
their hands not to pray but to lean. Job lives in both pride
and piety. The three friends make a world of their fear and
cunning. "Why ask for truth or justice?" they say. "Take
what you can get and pretend if s what you want After
all, it's what we want."

The great novelists have always been Jobs; the new
novelists of tremulous adjustment are the three friends:
"How long, O Lord, before his wife helps him to under-
stand?" These writers already understand, however, and
here in all its simplicity is their moral message:

Virtue consists in a faithful submission, perhaps with
understanding and sorrow, to the way things are. The way
things are is the best way for things to be or at least
there is nothing better which we can bear to imagine. If you

78 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

are still troubled, be patient. Have faith. All blessings will
come to you, and in decorator colors. The path of righteous-
ness will be made more abundantly clear in the VistaVision
version.

As a television editor put it, ''No more downbeat
dramas! We want happy stories about happy people with
happy problems." The ideal type of the happy problem is
represented by the issue facing that handsome couple in the
automobile advertisement, all gowned and tuxedoed, smil-
ing at each other and wondering what kind of an evening it
will be, while the baby-sitter broods benevolently in the
background: "Shall we take the Cadillac tonight?"

Answer that question in 100,000 words, man.

1957

HIP, COOL, BEAT AND FRANTIC

i. The American as Hipster

IN GREENWICH VILLAGE a dreamy young beggar in a
tattered Ivy League summer suit and a buttondown collar
with both buttons missing turns on an uptown couple to
ask, "Gimme a quarter for a Cadillac, hey?"

In New Orleans a pretty little department store model
approaches a man at a party, talces off her sweater, then
her bra, and says, "Let's ball, dig" by which she means,
Let's try a new far-out sound on the hi-fi. If he reaches
out to touch anything but the tone arm, she will say,
"You're through, frantic boy. You are sawed off." He dis-
appears from future guest lists.

In Denver a gaggle of young lads, not knowing what
to do on a warm spring evening, steal a car each, drive
them to the other side of town, park, steal a few more,
drive back to the starting point, park, and then settle down
to giggle about the confusion of the owners and the police.
Silence. Return of boredom. Yawn. Finally one says softly,
"Pops, why didn't we think of picking up on some chicks?"

In St. Louis a girl and her friend, who used to be a
drummer with a well-known quintet, both of them suffering

79

80 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

withdrawal symptoms he has been working to support
their habits by pimping for the girl beg an old pal to put
them up with bed and fridge for a few days. While the
friend is away at work, they telephone a friend in San
Francisco, give him the bit, and after gassing awhile, sug-
gest that they both just keep the connection and leave
the telephones off the hook. Their friend won't get the bill
until they are gone, far gone. Why do this to him? "He's
square, so square, man."

In Detroit a hi-fi engineer clucks sympathetically at
the plight of a young couple in college. It's true love, but
they have no place to go. The back seat of a car is for puppy
love and sprained backs. OK, they can use his apartment.
What they don't know is that there is a microphone con-
cealed in the mattress. Their friend invites them to a
party where he plays the tape before strangers.

In San Francisco a group of young poets announces
Religious Poetry Night, attracting a hall full of the plump,
mournful ladies (purple hats, veils, heaving freckled
bosoms) who adore such things. The first poet gets up to
read. "C S 1" he shrieks at the audience.

On State Street in Chicago a frozen-faced grifter stops
a passer-by, pushing out his hand and murmuring, "What
you say, pop? Give me a piece of skin/'

"Tin sorry, I don't know you."

"I don't know you either, man, but you like to have a
party?" He slides off and away with a passive dreamy girlish
look which has nothing sweet about it: it plots impossible
meanness, anything to make him feel something. He
doesn't know anybody, and says "man" to everybody be-
cause he can't be bothered remembering names.

In midtown Manhattan a writer, Jack Kerouac, pre-
pares for his interview on TV. "We're beat, man," he says.
"Beat means beatific, it means you get the beat, it means
something. I invented it." For the television audience he
announces, "We love everything, Billy Graham, the Big

THE AMERICAN AS HIPSTER - 81

Ten, rock and roll, Zen, apple pie, Eisenhower we dig
it all. We're in the vanguard of the new religion/' Jack
Kerouac likes to write of Charlie Parker as God and himself
as the Prophet.

These are hipsters.

Who is the hipster, what is it? The pure beast is as
hard to track as the pure "student" or "midwesterner," but
let us follow the spoor of history and symptoms. We will
probably find that "pure hipster" is a phrase like "100%
American" an unstable compound with an indefinite con-
tent.

Hipsterism began in a complex effort of the Negro
to escape his imposed role of happy-go-lucky animal A
few highly self-conscious urban Negro men sought to imi-
tate "white" diffidence, or coolness, or beatness. They
developed a style which was both a criticism of their
Bible-shouting and jazz-loving parents and a parody of the
detached, uninvolved city ofays. They improvised on an
unstated theme like bop and if you weren't with it, with
it and for it, you heard nothing but jangle. The horn rims
of the intellectual came to be known as bop glasses. They
blew fine abstractions. The joke was a good one.

Then their white friends took up the fashion, compli-
cating the joke by parodying a parody of themselves. Cool
music was the artistic expression of this hypertensive chill.
However, in order to keep from dancing, keep from shout-
ing, keep from feeling, a further help was needed and it
was found in heroin. Some of the earlier hot musicians had
used marijuana, many drank; these were springs toward
jumping high in a group. There was a strong prejudice
against the cats who went on junk, expressed in the super-
stition that you might mainline a fatal bubble of air into
your veins. Uh-uh, no baby, they said: and in practice they
found that the junkie blew lousy drum or horn, no matter
what he thought he was blowing.

The new generation preferred supercelestial private

82 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

music, however. Heroin dissolves the group and each man
flies alone all the way to Barbados. And without flapping
his arms.

Many other young Americans felt beat, wanted to keep
cool, and so into the arms of the first hipster society,
that still unravished bride of bop quietness, ran three angry
herds: (1) Main-street thugs with their sideburns, their
cycles, and their jeans; (2) college kids and a few literary
chappies, finding in the addict's cool stance an expression
of the frustration of fluid-drive lives in which the juicebox
had gone dry; and (3) Upper Bohemia, tired of Van Gogh,
Italian movies, charades, and sex, and so ready to try anti-
art, anti-sex, anti-frantic nonmovement. These latter com-
prise the Madison Avenue hippies, models who strip merely
to express their hatred of fashion magazines, admen and
lawyers who marry call girls, a host of Ivy League symbol-
manipulators, bloated with money and debt, pink with
General Electric sun tans and shame, who express their
benzedrine blues by wigging at night near a blasting rig.
"Well, you know . . . Albert Schweitzer doesn't make me
climb the wall. ... Is it true he eloped with Kim Novak?"

"Everyone says/' remarks the pretty girl who seeks to
please, "that I'm exceptionally fastidious, but would you
like me to do something nasty for you? I really wouldn't
mind. My name is Grape-Nuts, what's yours?"

Let us now move in closer to the hipster's harried
heart. When the hipster makes it with a girl, he avoids
admitting that he likes her. He keeps cool. He asks her
to do the work, and his ambition is to think about nothing,
zero, strictly from nadaville, while she plays bouncy-bouncy
on him. When the hipster makes it with boys, it's not be-
cause he's a homosexual and cares for it it's for money,
a ride home, pass the time of night while waiting for the
band to come back on. When the hipster steals a car, he
doesn't keep it or sell it; he hides it where the squares
will have trouble finding it, and writes "Mort a Louis A"

THE AMERICAN AS HIPSTER - 83 -

in soap on the windshield. When the hipster digs music,
Proust, or religion, it's to talk over, it's to carry around
in his jeans, it's to hit his buddies with; it makes no sense
or feeling, and the weirder it is, the cooler the kick.

In other words, the hipster is a spectacular instance
of the flight from emotion. He is like a sick refrigerator,
laboring with tremendous violence, noise and heat, and
all for one purpose to keep cool. This refrigerator is pow-
ered by crime without economic need; an editor to one of
the hipster writers complains, "Jeez, when I slept on park
benches and boosted from the A and P, I did it because I
had to. My kick was that I needed sleep and food. I didn't
do it to tell people about." The refrigerator is powered by
sex without passion; the sole passion is for the murder of
feeling, the extinguishing of the jitters. The refrigerator is
powered by religion without faith; the hipster teases him-
self toward the black battiness of oblivion, and all the vital
refreshment which religion has given the mystics of the
past is a distraction from the lovely stupor he craves. Unlike
Onan, who spilled his seed upon the ground, the hipster
spills his brains and calls it piety. He also wears music, art,
and religion as a kind of badge for identification. Instead
of the secret handshake which got him into Uncle Don's
Boys' Club or the Orphan Annie Secret Society, he now
says, "You dig the Bird? Proust? Zen?"

"I'm hip." says his friend. This phrase means: No need
to talk. No more discussion. I'm with you. I got you. Cool.
In. Bye-bye.

The language of hipsterism is a means toward non-
communication, a signal for silence. The truest lingo is
narcotics, because this more than anything gives Little Boy
Beat what he wants release from imagination and the
body an illusion not of omnipotence, as we are sometimes
told, but of a timeless browsing in eternity. In other words,
a cool simulation of death. The sentimental and sensational
talk about drugs producing sex maniacs is nonsense. The

84 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

man on a habit needs nothing more than his fix. Quiet,
quiet. He may perform terrible violence to get the drug, but
not sex: pleasure has nothing to do with the dreamy high
of heroin. The pale soft face of the addict, with his
smudged passive eyes and his drooping mouth, is almost
ladylike in its sweetness. It has no fight or love in it.

Heroin enables the hipster to stand guard over his soul,
dreaming of cool nothing, beautiful beat nothing, while
his feet go ratatat and he strokes a switchblade, a hand, or
a copy of Swann's Way. Needless to say, the proto- and
quasi-hipsters do not usually go all the way to the perfection
of heroin.

The current fad for the hipster his language, man-
ners and attitudes indicates that he is, as that fearful
phrase goes, "no isolated phenomenon/' Jack Kerouac pro-
claimed, "Even the Ivy League is going hip." Emerging out
of bop, narcotics, and the subtle rebellion of the Negro
against the charge of being "happy, excitable, emotional,"
the hipster takes one of his chief public models from that
most authentic American source, the movies. He ignores
the injunction of the pious thirteenth-century moralist,
John of Garland, who wrote: "Be not a fornicator, O
Student! Stand and sit upright, do not scratch thyself!"
The Stanislavsky hipsters scratch as if their soul's unease
were actually juicy fleas, slouch as if leaning to catch
Marlon's word from earth or Jimmy's from vaulted heaven.
The movie shadow of Dean or the Brando of The Wild
One is a part of the image of the hipster, whether he be
the smooth pink Ivy League metahipster, staring at himself
in the mirror of one of those shops where they apparently
do operations to remove the bones from men's shoulders,
or the long-chinned hairy protohipster with a girl jiggling
on the behind seat of his Harley-Davidson "74." In many
theaters where The Wild One played, there was a lineup
afterwards in the men's room, the cyclists in their nail-
studded black jackets scowling with adoration into the

THE AMERICAN AS HIPSTER &>

mirror as they rehearsed their public roles. Each man was
Brando, distant and violent. Each man was Marlon, cool
and beat. They stood in a row without shame, almost with-
out vanity (so pure it was), like neophytes for sacrifice in
their penitential leather, silver trim, sideburns, and duckass
haircuts. Scratch not, O Hipster!

And so the hipster's lines of communication spread
from a four-bit movie-house in a small town of the Mid-
west to the chic saloons of New York and the Coast He
reminds us of the Teddy Boys of England, the breaking-
loose wild brats of defeated Japan, the existentialist zazous
of Paris, tootling the petrified dixie they learned from old
Beiderbecke records. His apologists, particularly the literary
hipsters of San Francisco and New York are fond of
reaching back into history to invoke the criminal gods of
French poetry Rimbaud, who mysteriously vanished into
Africa, Villon, who ended up dancing on the gallows,
Genet, who is now a poet and playwright hero of Paris after
a career of thievery, blackmail, and male prostitution. The
very important difference between the American literary
hipster and his foreign models is that the great artist-
criminals were true outcasts from society: they did not
pick themselves up by the seat of their own pants and toss
themselves out They were driven by class differences and
economic pressure. A few of the Americans have performed
spectacularly mostly in the loony bin; one even played
William Tell with his wife and blew her head off but
these are individual troubles, not the product of any vast
and windy guilt of society. Who ain't got personal troubles?
I dig yours, man; but I got mine too.

In any case, the 1958 hipster is not the bold medieval
troubadour prince of song and con, nor the romantic ad-
venturer poet of later times, nor the angry driven Depres-
sion stiff: he is the true rebel without a cause. No, of
course, he has a cause his charred self, but a self without
connection or need. He is a reticent boyo with a yen for

86 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

thuggery, a reluctant visitor to the affairs of men, a faintly
girlish loiterer near the scenes of violence. If he can't
be a big boom-boom hero in a war, like Gary Cooper, at
least he can take the muffler off his rod, like Marlon.
Mainly he is afflicted with the great triumvirate disease of
the American male Passivity, Anxiety, Boredom. Indi-
vidualists without individuality, a sleepy brawl of knowing
nonthinkers, the lonely crowd at its grumbling loneliest,
the hipsters fall naturally to the absolute submission of a
marriage to heroin. Like the submission to boredom in
television and all the other substitutes for personal creative-
ness in American life, narcotics involve an abdication of
good sense by men deprived of the will to make their own
ways.

"I dig everything, man."

"What do you want to do now?"

"I don't know, man. Get some kicks somehow."

If the description of the hipster as "passive" strikes
you as harsh, look up the dictionary definition of the word:
"Med. Pertaining to certain morbid conditions character-
ized by deficient vitality and reaction."

The word hipster came in with bop, which is a way
of keeping cool musically, at the same time that narcotics
addiction burgeoned a way of keeping cool sexually. The
drug-taking hipster is not a sexual anarchist; he is a sexual
zero, and heroin is his mama, papa, and someone in bed.
(The pusher in A Hatful of Rain is called "Mother.")
Not every quasi-hipster mainlines into the tattoo on his arm,
of course, but the style of life is set by those who do. The
coolest boys call each other "daddy-o," as if their passivity
extends to thinking of every man as a potential guardian
father. Of course, the traveling musician also cannot be
bothered to remember names, so everyone is "man," "pops,"
"daddy-o." They worship the purple fantasy of torn-tee-
shirted masculinity created by Tennessee Williams, Wil-
liam Inge, and others who have invented a new theatrical

THE AMERICAN AS HIPSTER - 87 -

type the male impersonator. Adorably brutal, stripped of
the prime attributes of manliness intelligence, purpose,
control they are the curvaceous Mae Wests of popular
melodrama. Having died, James Dean and Charlie Parker
are defined as immortal. Living and growing up a bit, Mar-
lon Brando is a traitor to this myth of saintly suicide by
sports car or heroin. They might have forgiven his giving
up the bongos, but his receding hairline is a disgrace to the
cause. The strong silent hero must also be weak and pretty.

One of the curious bypaths of hipsterism leads to their
far-out religious camp. Jack Kerouac says, 'We're in the
vanguard of the new religion," which is a little like the
monk in the story who claimed that he was the world
champion for humility. They picked up on St. John of the
Cross for a time, Catholic ritual, St. Francis of Assisi (they
were St. Frantics); then they moved on toward Byzantine,
Greek, and Orthodox fantasies, with ikons and incense; they
made the Dostoevski scene. In recent years some have
taken to calling themselves Zen Hipsters, and Zen Bud-
dhism has spread like the Asian flu, so that now you can
open your fortune cookie in one of the real cool Chinese
restaurants of San Francisco and find a slip of paper with
the straight poop: "Dig that crazy Zen sukiyaki. Only a
square eats Chinese food." Promiscuity in religion stands,
like heroin, for despair, a feverish embracing of despair, a
passive sinking into irrationality. Zen and other religions
surely have their beauties, but the hipster dives through
them like a sideshow acrobat through a paper hoop into
the same old icy water of self-distrust below. The religious
activities of the hipsters cure their unease in the world the
way dancing cheek to cheek cures halitosis.

No wonder tihe hipster says, "Nada, Fm beat I'm
right in there, see I'm the most religious, the most humble
I'm swinging, man." He stammers because something
is missing, a vital part, the central works. His soul, sense
of meaning, individual dignity (call it how you like) has

- 88 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

been excised as unnecessary by a civilization very often
producing without good purpose. He feels that love is not
love, work is not work, even protest is not protest any
more. On the consumer's assembly line, in the leisure-time
sweatshop, he pieceworks that worst of all products of
anxiety boredom. This is the response of retreat from the
cold inanities of his time payments, luxurious discomfort,
dread of the successful future. Boredom is a corollary to
anxiety. As the middle-class man now buys a brick for the
new church (Does God need that basement bowling
alley?), so the hipster tries to find himself in intuitions of
meaning through the Anchor edition of Zen tales, or through
some other fashionable interior decoration. Naturally he
stammers, "Cool, mon, real cool/' He wants to stop mov-
ing, jittering, flittering. He displays himself as exemplary
because he has no wife, children, responsibilities, politics,
work. The middle-class man both has and does not have
these things. Who can call moving bits of paper a job?
Most Americans are paper-movers. How is love of wife and
children more than a social habit when a man feels qua
man (not as husband or father) that he has no authority
except in his own home?

When a man's house is his only castle, then he has
no castle.

Both smugness and ambition are characteristics of
human beings, not of animals, though rats and rabbits can
be taught despair by repeated electric shocks. Faced by the
threat of absolute manipulation, the hipster mobilizes
himself for a last stand and hops about the cage, twitch-
ing his tail, bumping the charged wires.

The clich^ which tells us that Americans love Things,
Possessions, does not go far enough. Americans also de-
mand experiences of power, one way or the other, in person
or out of the picture tube. This seems normal enough to
be a condition of life, but not when the starved mirage of
power crowds out the quietness which gives experience
meaning and organizes a man to face his private issues of

THE AMERICAN AS HIPSTER - 89

working, loving, having children, dying. Certain experiences
lead away from rather than toward, and faster and faster
we go: the experience does not help; we try wilder experi-
ence; this does not help; still more wild, wilder. The extreme
of a flatulent submission to the mass media eventually
stops all experience in its tracks, in the guise of giving
perfect experiences which make it possible to carry on.
Television as a medium of entertainment is not the villain
any more than good whiskey is a villain; they can both be
good friends. It is the bleared submission by depleted souls
which destroys. Relaxation is one thing sharing experience
vicariously is a great experience to which the imagination
entitles us. To be stunned is another matter entirely. De-
spair by electronic shock.

Sensitive to all this, the hipster has decided to quit
resign have no more of it. Instead of being part of a
mass audience before the picture tubes, he becomes an
audience of one before the hypo. He gives up on the issue
of being human in society. He decides that the problem
does not exist for him. He disaffiliates. The man who cares
is now derided for being "frantic."

But of course the hipster is still a part of a bewildered
America in which Tab Hunter confides to an interviewer
that he can only sleep with his Teddy bear in bed with him.
The hipster is victim of the most hopeless condition of
slavery the slave who does not know that he is a slave
and is proud of his slavery, calling it "freedom." Incurable?
Nearly. The posture of negation and passivity thinks it is
religion and rebellion; instead it is a mob phenomenon.
These nihilists sail dreamy down the Nile of throughway
America, spending many a sleepless day figuring out some-
thing real cool to do at night, and end up trying to con-
vince themselves, as Jack Kerouac does, that Charlie Parker
is God. Kerouac's birdmen in his novel, On the Road,
search for coolness within their beatness, hipness within
their jeans-and-dirty-hair dream of quickies with marvelous
girls (who also wear dirty hair and jeans). Occasionally, as

- 90 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

in the Kerouac variety of superfrantic subhipster, sex takes
the place of dope. This is a kind of sex which also takes
the place of sex. The way some men gloat over possessions,
he keeps score of his hero's erotic blitzes, forgetting that
if you are the trooper who uses sex as a weapon every
notch in a weapon weakens the weapon.

The hipster is a street-corner, bar, and partying phe-
nomenon, a creature of mobs. One Rimbaud may be a
genius; a crowd of them is a fad. An earlier fad for psycho-
analysis has this in favor of it: Freud believed in the prime
value of emotions, but in a necessary control by the in-
telligence. In other words, he valued society despite the
discontents of civilization. The hipster gives up society,
gives up intelligence, and thinks he is doing this in favor
of the emotions; but he has already, without making a
decision about them, let his feelings seep away through a
leaky personality. What is left is a spasmodic jerk, though
some of the individual spokesmen also have vivacious
talent No wonder that the madhouse is seen as the refuge
of their *T)est minds/' Catatonia, here we come.

These shrill moonbirds turn out to be rigid earth satel-
lites, rocketed by bureaucrats beyond their ken into the air
of reality, where they circle in a pattern determined without
choice, give out a diminishing signal, draw to earth and
burn, crumble, vanish.

When Yeats looked into the future to find a terrible
savior, an evolution up from animality into something
strange and wonderful:

What rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethelem to be born?

he did not mean James Dean. Perhaps, as they claim,
the tunneling hipster's avoidance of feeling can lead to
a new honesty of emotion. Perhaps a groundhog might
some day learn to fly, but man O man, that will be one
strange bird. 1958

x. Hip, Cool, Beat, and Frantic

"WHOEE, I told my soul." This urgent message from Jack
Kerouac to his soul contains most of the sense which
emerges from his frantic tirade in the form of a novel, On
the Road, and it is his ability to make such stuff hip,
cool, beat, and frantic, all at once, which has earned him
a title more valued nowadays than that of "novelist": He
is a Spokesman.

For what this time? Kerouac has appointed himself
prose celebrant to a pack of unleashed zazous who like to
describe themselves as Zen Hipsters poets, pushers and
panhandlers, musicians, male hustlers, and a few marginal
esthetes seeking new marginal distinctions. They have a
center in San Francisco, another in Greenwich Village, and
claim outposts in Tangiers, on merchant vessels, in Chicago,
a fragment among the fragments in New Orleans, a fringe
of the fringe in Mexico City. Despite all wandering, how-
ever, their loneliness for the herd sends them eagerly
trumpeting back into each other's arms after brief periods
of saying whoee to their souls among the outianders. At
least two of them happen to be talented Allen Ginsberg,

01 -

- 92 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

a poet of shock and wild wit, whose blathering Howl really
does contain some of the liveliest epithets in contemporary
verse; and Jack Kerouac, whose mammoth journal has been
edited into the form of a novel by The Viking Press. One
of the heroes of On the Road, of course, is Allen Ginsberg
(under the name of Carlo Marx) , just as one of the heroes
of Howl is Jack Kerouac (under the name of Jack Kerouac) .

Who are these hipsters, what are they? A distinction
must be made between the authentic beast a phenomenon
of frigidity and shock and its literary fleas, who are mainly
Ivy League desperadoes, romantic dreamers fondly recalling
hypes and heists that other chaps hyped or heisted. In the
background of Kerouac's book glimmer the cultural signs
that the people he is spokesmaning for are really here:
their photographs in Harper's Bazaar and Mademoiselle;
two issues of the Evergreen Review and New Directions 16
largely devoted to their work; a publishing venture in San
Francisco; articles on them in The New "York Times, The
Nation, the New Republic, New World Writing, Dissent,
the Chicago Review, and elsewhere; a few books, including
Clellon Holmes's Go/, which belongs to an earlier period
(1952), although it describes many of the people impli-
cated in On the Road, (Historical periods rush upon us
like men's fashions: "Bop was somewhere between its
Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period
which began with Miles Davis. . . .") Mr. Ginsberg and
Mr. Gregory Corso recently teamed up to make an agitprop
tour of New York which shook Madison Avenue real bad,
though they have yet to appear on behalf of Schweppes
(with beards), Hathaway (eyepatch), Marlboro (tattooed
hands), or in poems by e. e. cummings (they too are free
spirits, FREE, they told him).

On the Road carries the ensign of the hipster with
considerable humor and vitality, much awe, and a little of
the literary hipster's prevalent social disease, the faked-up
pretension that these are underground intellects who know

HIP, COOL, BEAT, AND FRANTIC - 93

all about Zen Buddhism, St. John of the Cross, Proust, and
good bad old Charlie Parker, and could tell us if they only
cared to. The awe breaks to happy moments of lucidity
which are those of a real writer. Kerouac then sees the
hipster, agape and bedazzled, mumbling about the world-
historical significance of bop but only mumbling. What
he tells, he tries to tell true enough according to his
lights. At times he almost seems to understand that Charlie
Parker blew fine horn, but was not God.

However, there is a structural flaw in this contem-
porary revival of the literary-criminal or ecstatic-delinquent
underground which makes Jack Kerouac's book a proof of
illness rather than a creation of art, a novel. In the first
place, Villon, Rimbaud, and Jean Genet really lived by
their criminal passivity and wits. They showed their rumps
to society because they were caught from behind. These
Americans, however, are literary in their coolness, hipness,
beatness, and they are unauthentic exactly to the degree
that they are literary. The hipster-writer is a perennial per-
verse bar mitzvah boy, proudly announcing: "Today I am
a madman. Now give me the fountain pen." The frozen
thugs gathered west of Sheridan Square or in the hopped-
up cars do not bother with talk. That's why they say
"man" to everyone they can't remember anybody's name.
But Ginsberg and Kerouac are frantic. They care too much,
and they care aloud. "I'm hungry, I'm starving, let's eat
right now!" That they care mostly for themselves is a sign
of adolescence, but at least they care for something, and
it's a beginning. The hipster is past caring. He is the crim-
inal with no motivation in hunger, the delinquent with no
zest, the gang follower with no love of the gang; i.e., the
worker without ambition or pleasure in work, the youngster
with undescended passions, the organization man with
sloanwilsonian gregory-peckerism in his cold, cold heart.
He has entered a deep cavern where desire and art are

94 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

unbiown; swimming blind, scared, and silent, he eats what-
ever is alive a symptom of trouble, but hardly feeling it
any more.

Still, hipsterism has touched a number of writers,
since the extremes always attract and the hipster fish is the
coldest and clammiest and perhaps the deadliest creature
of the deep seas in which we all now swim. "Nothing
human is alien to me." Goethe, among others, said it The
hipster's pressured soul, squirting bile, excites the artist
who, out of pity or morbidity, either saintly or slumming,
dives into the world of the ice-blooded. Yes, something
has made them that way. There are connections. They
have carried their rebellion from society past the end:
excising from their innards the cant of a mass culture, these
fierce surgeons have also badly cut up their humanity. They
are cool. Now they blow nothing but the miseries.

Bernard Wolfe has learned to keep a heavy leg out-
side, in the wide world of politics and philosophy, and
therefore to make art of the hipsters' death-in-life; Norman
Mailer has gone to school to them, and may yet graduate,
as he has restlessly graduated from other ideologies. The
poet Kenneth Rexroth is their youngish elder statesman,
whose collected essays in their defense might be entitled
Zen Strikes Back; Lawrence Lipton contributes a hairy,
academic apologia pro vita nostruomo; the late Isaac Rosen-
feld was one of their most perceptive critics. There are
others whom the stoolies of criticism have fingered with
deadly inaccuracy, such as Nelson Algren, Chandler Bros-
sard, Anatole Broyard, and (may he put away his Harley-
Davidson "74," nevermore to roam in nail-trimmed leather
jacket and buttock-cracking jeans) Herbert Gold. But if
we grant that the hipster-writer exists, the first thing to
understand about him is that he is not a hipster, although
he likes to play as if, any more than Nelson Algren is a
Polish poker player. He is propagandist for a cause that
does not ask to be preached. He is hung up on the dilem-

HIP, COOL, BEAT, AND FRANTIC - 95

ma of being cool and frantic at the same time. "Some of
the best minds of our generation/' chants Allen Ginsberg,
"have given up thinking."

By definition an artist cannot be a hipster though he
might follow the old style of dipping into forbidden waters,
reminding us in various ways of Brecht, Gide, Gorki, and
a number of English and Spanish philosophical picaros.
Coolness can be defined as refusing-to-care not uncaring,
but refusing. The hipster steals a car with a copy of Swann's
Way in his pocket a book he doesn't read, a car he doesn't
want The hipster's ideal is to smoke a cigar and study the
Daily News while having immobile sexual intercourse. He
has to carry out the act in order to refuse its meaning in
vitality and refreshment and to debase the girl: he cannot
simply abstain. The frantic man swings. He may move
badly; his prose may be derivative and his reactions pre-
mature; but he moves, man. The ash spills from his cigar.
He gets more than kicks out of life.

When Kerouac wails about "many and many a lost
night, singing and moaning and eating the stars and drop-
ping the juices drop by drop on the hot tar," he is in a
respectable literary tradition, and the tradition's name is
Thomas Wolfe. This is not hipster talk. When he passes
through Fresno, sees an Armenian, and thinks: "Yes, yes,
Saroyan's town," he has some of that aging bucko's free-
wheeling self-love and just as literary. When he hints at
orgy, his real daddy is the daddy of all the living boheems,
Henry Miller, though he practices a conciseness of sexual
rhetoric which probably derives from the publisher's tim-
idity rather than from any cool indifference. Sometimes
he writes the purest straight-and-true Hemingway, as when
he meets a Mexican girl: "Her breasts stuck out straight
and true." Later his friend Dean is driving a car no-hands,
but "it hugged the line straight and true."

This is not beat. This is not cool. This is not hip.

96 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

This is the Columbia College boy vacationing on his GI
Bill money, reading Papa. But despite all the bookish
derivations, Kerouac retains a stubborn integrity: "I had
nothing to offer anybody but my own confusion/ 7

He has something more to offer. I would guess, writing
before publication, that the bookselling business is not yet
ready for a particular blend of nihilism and mush which
might someday take its place in the gassy world of best-
sellerdom.* When Kerouac mentions the Bomb, he makes
us blush: he doesn't mean it, it's pure stylishness, and we
resent the fact that the great disaster of contemporary his-
tory should be used in passing to let us know that a poet
"cares/' However, beyond the pretense, the derivations, the
plotless rambling, the grate of vacant noise, Kerouac some-
how achieves communication of a happy sense for the
humor of car-stealing and marital confusion, for the in-
sanity and pomp of addicts, for the joys of being tormented.
And he gives us a fascinating tape recording of the skinny
Bunyanesque car-thief, Dean Moriarty, craving intellect,
wives, fast travel and bop, emitting fiery nonsense from the
tail of his hurtling nuttiness:

But of course, Sal, I can talk as soon as ever and
have many things to say to you in fact with my own
little bangtail mind I've been reading and reading
this gone Proust all the way across the country and
digging a great number of things I'll never have
TIME to tell you about and we STILL haven't talked
of Mexico and our parting there in fever -but no need
to talk. Absolutely, now, yes?

He balances the crazed Dean with a certain wryness about
himself, whom he calls Sal Paradise:

She was a nice little girl, simple and true. . . .

Oh-oh, Hemingway again.
* it was. H. G., Jan. 1962.

HIP, COOL, BEAT, AND FRANTIC 97

. . . and tremendously frightened of sex. I told her
it was beautiful. I wanted to prove this to her. She let
me prove it, but I was impatient and proved nothing.
She sighed in the dark. "What do you want out of
life?" I asked, and I used to ask that all the time of
girls.

Here he enlists both our indulgence and our sympathy
for poor impatient Sal, and does it with wit and feeling
and imaginative detachment But at other places he is
capable of the melodrama of the pure-bred dormitory
genius:

I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet
who has walked across the land to bring the dark
Word, and the only Word I had was <r Wow."

At still another juncture he forgets that he is the Prophet
of Wow and informs us that his word is Mad. There are
other words in his sack, too.

But wha hoppin?

Nothin' hoppin, man.

Dean Moriarty is brilliantly transcribed, not rendered
as a man through time and desire, despite all his velocity,
He begins mad, he stays mad, he concludes mad: he is
a stripped, tormented, dancing celluloid doll, burning fast,
without a gesture than can surprise us. Kerouac is loyal
to him. In garlands of prose, the words mad, madness,
madly are the stems to which the buffeted reader can look
for a principle of organization. It is the end of the philos-
ophy for which the hungering boy traveler yearns, the great
death-in-life to fill the boredom. He is fading away because
of boredom, since nothing can make him happy, nothing
can enlist him for more than a few spasmodic jerks, and
the mad ones seem in his eyes to have an inner purpose.
They are driven, while he is hung up. Unfortunately for
communicative purpose, after many repetitions of the
phrase, "It was mad," we hear not the trumpets of Blake

98 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

nor the divine flap of Antonin Artaud, but rather an interior
decorator describing last night's binge. "As in a dream/'
he adds because he wants to make life a mad dream and
so pronounces MAD and DREAM at us over and over "we
made the bed bounce a half hour/' The precise report of
the time arouses our suspicion. Why was he looking at his
watch? Such modest journalism does not imply a dreamlike
transport.

Kerouac's people rarely talk, respond, exchange warmth
with each other. They split their guts to cross the con-
tinent, say "Hello, whooee, wow, Charlie Parker, soul" to
their friends, get a quick divorce, make a quick marriage,
and rush back to San Fran to a first or second or third wife,
bringing along a girl from Denver. They zoom up and
down the continent for no reason but bored impulse,
though they call it "find our souls." Then they write
eighteen thousand-word letters explaining why they never
had that good long talk. Words fly, but they cannot com-
municate. They "tell" each other things: "Went for a
walk in the middle of the night and came back to my
girl to tell her what I thought about during my walk. I
told her a number of things."

Even the wonderful chatter of the run-on hero, Dean
Moriarty, which is the strongest thing in the book, tells
us only one thing: He began as a psychopath and ended
as a psychotic. Though lively along the way, this is not
much of a journey, and tells little of anyone's life includ-
ing the real life of Moriarty.

On the Road asks us to judge the lives of its characters;
it requires no real-life acquaintance with them to see that
they are "true" projections that is, the book represents
Kerouac's attempt to do justice to his friends. This is a very
different matter from the artist's attempt to project mean-
ingful people through the medium of his imagination onto
the medium of the imaginations of readers: characters who

HIP, COOL, BEAT, AND FRANTIC 99 -

will be true to possibility, not necessarily to fact On the
Road reads right along it contains, essentially, some lively
rambling conversation about the exploits of big bad boys
but it is deeply insular in its intentions. Kerouac has not
faced an important decision about whom he is writing for
his "soul" (to prove that he has one), his friends (to
prove that he is worthy of them), or the public at whom
his editor and publishers aim the book. He seems to be
confused by the difference between writing a novel about
hipsters a legitimate stunt in an age of antiheroes and
becoming a hipster in order to leave a track of paper.

Kerouac displays some of the belly-patting in-group
satisfaction which is expressed, in another arena, by another
confused champion, Homer Capehart, senator from In-
diana, who said, "I would rather be a friend of the President
of the United States without brains than a friend of the
Senator from Oklahoma with brains." Underlying Ker-
ouac's autobiographical study of himself and his friends
("Fiction is not possible my pals are too great we must
do justice," he seems to say) is the decision that he would
rather be a friend of a mediocre poet with madness than of a
good poet without madness, rather a hip madman than a
nonhip sane one, rather a beat bum than anyone else in the
world. The writer and the senator are equally smug.

Another example of insularity: locked in the privacy
of fond illusion, Kerouac even believes in the 'liappy, true-
hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America" with an old-fashioned
heartache of nostalgia that is quite touching except for the
harm and ignorance it stands for. It is my impression that
such writers at Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin are re-
sponding to a different sort of experience; the evidence of
Negro life shows this people moving out of the Happy,
True-hearted, Ecstatic category into a more complicated
set of responses to the pressures under which they live. The
reader can cite his own experiences, anything from bus
boycotts to cool jazz, in support of this truism. It may be

* 100 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

cause for sighing to the sentimentalists, but like the sta-
tionary hipster, "Movement," in Bernard Wolfe's novel,
The Late-Risers, or the unnamed hero of Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man, the Negro today aims to be more white
than the whites.

I take the Ginsberg of HowZ and the Kerouac of On
the Road to be typical of their little boys' town at its rare
best, serious, convinced, and trying hard. Through them,
one can ask what this clan of superfrantic subhipsters wants.
Are they bringing a scout's message, a Word? Do they
represent a new style of American? Will they provide a
bracing antidote to the chronic headache of American cul-
ture?

They seem to be more a wounded shrilling and shrink-
ing than an angry and vital reaction. Curiously enough
their command performance of ecstatic rituals has misled
them; they feel no ease in the expense of impulse; puzzled,
they withdraw from pleasure. Madness is the penultimate
escape, which seems both to allow joy and illumination
and to oil over the troubling itch of responsibility. It seems
so, that is, to the broody tourist, traveling home to his
mother's suburb to describe his friends to his notebook,
and then justifying them to his editors. I am sure that from
within madness is different, and less delightful. They are
ascetics of excess. They yearn for the annihilation of sense
through the abuse of the senses. They look for a society
of unchanging virtue in which the risks of possibility have
been removed; pure love will reign, green marijuana will be
discovered in the mad glove compartments of every straight
and true stolen car, Saroyan will live at peace in Fresno,
souls will tell each other things. The terms of heaven have
changed, but all this is very familiar. The ultimate goal is
that single small step beyond madness.

What Kerouac wants is what the mystics driven by
fright in all ages want, "the complete step across chrono-

HIP, COOL, BEAT, AND FRANTIC * 101

logical time into timeless shadows ... the stability of the
Intrinsic mind." Such unhappy nonsense, such droopy-
jeaned nay-saying to the blessed facts of time and change!
There are other possible mysticisms, but Kerouac models
his heaven on Marie Slopes' elegant, Swedenborgian, im-
possibly weary orgasm, saying "wow!" in advance just be-
cause he hopes to describe it as "MAD." No wonder all the
fireworks. The experience he craves is simple, dark, and
in any case inevitable to all of us sooner or later immola-
tion. He is not content to wait Mortality terrifies him;
better death at once than the long test of life. He expresses
this fantasy with convulsive violence, trying to disguise the
truth from himself and from the reader, using breathless-
ness as a surrogate for energy. But he is compelled. The
jitters are not an active state of being. He puts to the serv-
ice of his rockabye dream of oblivion all the violence, sex,
drink, dope, and the batty babbling buddies with whom
he populates his heaven, anything, every easeful and bitter
experience, even that of turning to rot in the Mexican
jungle:

The jungle takes you over and you become it The

dead bugs mingled with my blood; the live mosquitoes
exchanged further portions. . . . Soft infinitesimal
showers of microscopic bugs fanned down on my face
as I slept, and they were extremely pleasant.

It would help Jack Kerouac if he could find within
himself the strength to stop writing about Love, Life, and
Death (with a dot dot dot between these stylish abstrac-
tions) and remember the real boy who enjoyed midget auto
races. He might then discover that he knows something
about death, life, and love. At present he is a wolf of the
hotrod age, Thomas and Virginia melted together into a
damp creature from which even Aristophanes, who loved
hybrids, would turn away. This wolf bays at the hipster
moon, but howls for the Helen of someone else's youth;

102 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

it ravens down the raw streets of America, taking gladness
in the fact that the Mississippi has lived up to its advance
notice in Mark Twain, describing one haunt after another
as "storied," literary as literary can be, raised on the great
books, as aren't we all? Where Thomas Wolfe broke his
head butting against the world of New York intellectual
highlife, Jack Kerouac is butting but unbroken against the
world of the hipsters, a party that never quite pleases its
adherents, no matter how much marvelous wild partying
foreplay. Despite its drag race of words and gestures, On
the Road does nothing, thinks nothing, acts nothing, but
yet manages to be a book after all a loving portrait of hip
Dean Moriarty and his beat, cool friends as they run 110
miles an hour in order to stand still. It's a frantic book, and
for that reason there is hope for Jack Kerouac.

Pseudo-Hipster, You Can't Run Further.

Meta-Hipster, You Can't Yell Louder.

Hipster, Go Home.

1957

3. The Rise of the Treeniks

A MODEST PROPOSAL: that the United States government
declare the planting of trees illegal.

Result: at last the youth of America will find some-
thing new to do. Boys will sneak out in the dead of night
with seedlings. The most advanced writers will discover a
fresh subject matter: celebration of the gangs of roving
youths, clad in torn tee shirts and blue jeans, with pockets
filled with seeds and a language all their own. Defrocked
tree surgeons in sordid little upstairs offices will forge pre-
scriptions for oak, pine, and maple, for purely agricultural
purposes. Teen agers, posing as landscape architects or
lumber growers, will hold up nurseries and make off with
truckloads of potted birch.

Naturally, there must be rigorous repression raids of
illegal plantations, destruction of smuggled saplings. Cam-
ouflaged greenhouses will spring up in every corner of the
great cities. The menace of the treeniks will be explained
in the popular magazines, with actual photographs of boy
and girl treeniks loafing on pine needles. The fellow trav-
elers of the treeniks, who do not actually plant trees

104 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

themselves, will meet to play the bongos about it, employ-
ing with partial accuracy the language of reforestation,
composing rhapsodies about the joy of the open road when
you have an unplanted field before you. A few noisy tree-
planters must be put in prison. Pushers, selling saplings,
will go into hiding. For offering an acorn to a minor, the
punishment will be twenty years. Harboring a Dangerous
Vegetable will be an even greater offense.

In coffee houses all over the country, poems will be
read to jazz, all about how cool it is in the shade of the
willow, dig. ("This is what I mean timber, man.") At this
point every high school boy will want to be a treenik and
the price of illegal saplings to an addict who really needs
his fix may go as high as a hundred dollars.

The police will be sent out on raids, burning and
chopping and destroying any tree they discover. But they
can never catch up with an acquiescent populace. The more
they punish and destroy, the more widespread will be trees
and treeniks. Certain policemen, of course, will grow
wealthy. There will be mysterious traces of soil under their
fingernails and in the trunks of their white Cadillacs.

Students of popular culture will attempt to define the
difference between Treesters and Treeniks, (The Treester
planted trees before anyone else knew that they existed.
The Treenik only started when it became a federal offense,
described in detail in Life magazine.) The metaphysical
sociologists will point out that this fad represents another
manifestation of what William James called the need for
a "moral equivalent of war." That is, the youth of our
society requires some significant action which combines
violence, innovation, and rebelliousness with an outlet for
creative desires, the instinct to follow fashion, and a herd
obedience. The Grove Press will devote its Evergreen Re-
view to the glorification of the New Arboreal Revolution
(sex replaced by tree-watching).

And while the police raid and the non-tree un-wardens

THE RISE OF THE TREENIKS - 105

burn and the prisons are filled with illegal tree users and
the youth is corrupted and the commentators commentate,
this huge America of ours will in no time at all be covered
by forests, green, immense, silent, and mysteriously con-
soling.

1960

Fiction of the Sixties

THE PIG is the most discreet animal; it never looks at the
sky. With just this much apology for my indiscretion, let
me try to anticipate the color and content of American
fiction in the decade ahead. I shall first perform some
harassed wigwagging before my brother novelists, stalled
on our dark roadways, and then offer an optimistic view of
the next place on the road, and hope that the peculiar dis-
connection between actual and prospective station can
provide an occasion for inventory of self by both readers
and writers.

The immediate decade past has not been a bad time
for novelists if they did not care about getting their
messages through. There have been career opportunities
aplenty for bona fide, stamped and certified, government-
inspected, prime tellers of stories. George P. Elliott, one
of the fine writers who matured during the decade of the
fifties, recently commented wryly on these fellowships and
prize opportunities, academic offers, lecture offers, writers'
conference offers, article-writing offers, ghost-writing offers,
review offers, copy-composing offers: "Fiction writers are in

106 -

FICTION OF THE SIXTIES 107 *

short supply." Having been sponsored by United Artists
and Esquire and sent by first-class jet on a visit to Holly-
wood, where he stayed at the Beverly Wilshire and had
his clothes valeted by the great movie company, and
having been locked in man-to-man talk with mighty agents
and famous actors, all this energy spent on an article for
Esquire about a movie producer, he returns to the little
back room in New York where he does his writing. There
he contemplates the enthusiastic reviews of his novel,
Parktilden Village, which has thus far been sold to about
700 readers. Mr. Elliott has finally come into some esteem
as a writer without, however, being read.

Of course, 700 out of 180 million Americans suggests a
startling number of nonreaders for a vigorous contemporary
talent, but it is not a much more lugubrious percentage
than 3000 out of 180 million, which is more typical of
the nonbest-selling novel. The American cornucopia has
enabled the American writer to keep alive, but the same
embarrassment of riches which has fed his family with
irregular spurts of cash has provided the prospective reader
with enough distractions to avoid any imposition of books
on his time. Perhaps some new foundation should give
fellowships to novel-readers.

We are all aware of the peculiar inadequacy of book
distribution, beginning and ending with the tic of the
nervous book buyer, who asks for whatever title is floating
in the air that week. The first books of Saul Bellow,
Nelson Algren, and Vladimir Nabokov sell in the hundreds;
in these cases, eventually something happy occurs, a
peculiar combination of virtue having out and the wheel
of fortune spinning. A novel like Ralph Ellison's Invisible
Man sells poorly, receives an important prize, picks up
sales, finally does okay. For the publisher, who operates by
statistics and needs only one best-seller to justify ten
poor sellers, the business risk is a reasonable one. But what
about the forsaken novelist, who loves his book and wrote

. IDS THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

it to say something important to an audience which does
not realize that it has been spoken to? Well, he either
sheds a noble tear (his own view of it) or a maudlin one
(everyone else's opinion). He reminds himself, if he has
the required strength: "No one asked you to write stories,
pal. Do you want to or don't you?"

Answer: he wants to, and wants to again; a gadfly
whose victims do not know when they have been gadded.

So much for shoptalk about the writer's financial and
nervous problems. But the peculiarly book-shy audience
bears watching for clues about the subject matter of serious
American novelists in the immediate past and in the future
which we project from it.

In the thirties and the early forties, political and social
ideologies preoccupied the minds of most writers, and
many books ended with such rooster morals as "Strike!"
or "He died for all of us" and had doctrinaire donkey titles
like Brother, the Laugh Is Bitter. The old problems were
still with us during the fifties, but the teeth of the beasts
were sugared into ruin by the fact of a victorious war (how-
ever temporary ), economic prosperity (however specious),
and the lack of an important political ideal to set against
apparent American failures. The blissful despair of the
twenties had turned to the blind staggers; the great enemies
of the thirties, fascism and depression, were slumbering
quietly; the hopes of Marxism and Peace Through War
were dead.

The coming-of-age novel, the quest novel, the novel
of philosophical purpose demanded intense formal and
stylistic ingenuity to fill the gaps left by diminished political
passions. Novelists could not yet make their deep response
to the Bomb and a lemming impulse to race suicide drama-
tically relevant in fiction. There was no active cause to join,
no genuine war to declare (plenty of false wars and
individual bandit expeditions). The simplicity and resolu-

FICTION OF THE SIXTIES 109

tion which even the dramatically complicated mind finds
necessary were hard to discover in public life.

A characteristic expression of the period is John
Cheever's uneasy exploration of middle-class decorum in
The Wapshot Chronicle and his many stories. Truman
Capote and J. D. Salinger attempted to raise elegant ec-
centricity and child psychology to the level of literature.
Writers like Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Bernard
Malamud managed to make explicit philosophical purposes
relevant in fiction by the force of their personal vision.

The great fads were, first, the novel of American self-
congratulation, typified by Sloan Wilson, Cameron
Hawley, Herman Wouk, and other celebrants of business
and obedience; and later in the decade, the so-called hipster
writers, who also failed to produce a convincing voice. The
trouble with both groups is a symptomatic one. They are
not egotistical, but rafter nonegotistical, lacking a firm
sense of self, thus terribly frightened, needful, vain, de-
manding from a public which is itself avid for genuine
personality an assurance that they really exist. The weak
ego strives for strong assertion through immolation in
bureaucracy or advertisements for its selfishness: Help me,
tell me I am here!

Many other passive novelists settle for everybody's un-
happy childhood, exposes of the already exposed, tre-
mendously gory and horny war novels, pseudo revivals of
religious conformity, imitations of Henry James and Kafka
and Fitzgerald, guilt-mongering and magnolia-mongering
and the moony, loony interior decoration of prose. Some
of them seem to know Shelley's description of the skylark,
which pours out its "full heart In profuse strains of unpre-
meditated art," but they forget that the sincere skylark
is a mere feathered bird, not a hairy poet, and a human
being's sincerity must come of more than the winds of
nature blowing in his craw. The poet or the novelist sings
most with his own heart when the arbiter of his intelligence

. 110 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

if

has brought both his body and the rest of the world to-
gether into the room where he does his singing.

Certain ideological writers the Freudians, the neo-
religious, and the hipsters, for example like to think
of themselves as devilish chaps with probes stuck into their
very depths, and so they rejoice. Milton's Satan made their
point with succinct awareness and terror: "Which way I
fly is Hell; my self am Hell" and thus understood that the
awful privacy of the rebel must be mitigated by some
meaningful communion with others. The writer needs
a causal connection with his society, some sense that his
work does something to make everyone's privacy a privilege
rather than a burden. Else numbness, coolness, the erosion
of self, and the acquiescence in self-murder around us.
Without this causal connection with the wide world, the
writer may issue shrill directives from his own coddled
privacy; he may fidget and giggle and tell himself he is
Whitman or Kafka, hip or cool, gimmicked by chic and
as fashionable as a sports car; he is in hell all the same.

The categories of American virtue (material accumu-
lation plus good intentions) and American guilt (spiritual
vagueness plus nuclear derangement plus impure inten-
tions plus a clouded future) exclude the writer who is not
a compulsive joiner of causes. And yet he seeks to broaden
the allegiance of his one-member team. The most serious
writers of this period feel as an immediate personal depriva-
tion the lack of an imperative politics, an enveloping and
involving view of the world. And the best creation of the
time has implied an effort to close this gap. Probably
no imaginative writing can do the work of a society in
giving a sense of public hope and purpose to a people,
but awareness of the lack and the personal effort to find
personal solutions constitute an essential labor in a difficult
time. Literature, like politics, is an art of the possible.

A few writers have fled to traditional shelters re-
ligious revival, political dogma, hedonism and its anemic,

FICTION OF THE SIXTIES -111 *

psychoanalytic grandchild, the pursuit of health, which
provides a misunderstood parody of the classical purgation
by pity and terror in order to reach order and calm. The
strongest have accepted their ignorance and their doubt;
they will continue, in the decade to come, perhaps learn-
ing themselves, as they note along the way what some
among the world of men have learned. As Ralph Ellison's
invisible man asks, "Who knows but that, on the lower
frequencies, I speak for you?" The labor of opposing
invisibility to others and to ourselves will be continued
by novelists who aim not at a secondary quality of health
but at the primary issue of ransoming the time by inventing
a sharply personal reality.

In the decade ahead, the successors to Faulkner and
Hemingway will be new novelists, striving in their little
rooms and staring out the window, as writers always do;
but they will be striving with issues and staring out over
a world which the elder statesmen of American letters must
find quite alien, slippery white, electronic, forbidding. The
society celebrated by Faulkner and Hemingway, Wolfe
and Fitzgerald, Dos Passes and Sherwood Anderson and
Steinbeck has become a matter of history a history of
vital concern, perhaps, but history. For that essential fic-
tional mastery of the way things are, we must now look
to younger voices evaluating an altered experience of Amer-
ica. No one can call the roll of the strong talents of the
sixties. Many of them are already at work, but some are
probably still in high school. However, we can anticipate
something of the kind of world out of which their stories
and novels will emerge.

The environment of American writing in the sixties
will provide an accelerated continuation of the postwar
period, with a possibility of closer challenge and confronta-
tion of the risks of technological explosion, of living on a
shrinking globe jostled by tie Soviet Union and China,
and of the revolutionary reversals of the importance of work

112 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

and leisure. The bloating of cities and populations, with
resulting great shifts of power, suggests frontiers at least
as exciting as those out in space.

Many of the writers who will nominate themselves
to reckon with our world through the magical synthesis
of fiction will seem more strange than Martians to some
of us. Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, the Depression, and the
War will be dim history to them. My earliest "political"
memories are of a teacher weeping over the bank closings
and of the freight trains ant-heaped with men traveling
hopelessly in search of work. What political reality will
the youngest writers of the sixties carry forward from
their seventh years? A TV apology by a worried candidate?
A discussion of the effect of ileitis on the stock market?

Not many of these writers will wash dishes in diners
while going to college; scholarships even reach down to
arts students. When they rebel against their parents, sug-
gests one psychiatrist, the mania for popular psychology
will oblige them to rebel against being understood rather
than being misunderstood. They will be richer, healthier,
groupier, more suburban, rarely driven into the early isola-
tion of economic crisis, second-generation conflict, and
rapid changes of class.

They will nevertheless discover the eternal problems
lying in wait after their air-conditioned classrooms and
their Merit Scholarships. How to find proper work for a
man? How to find a way of living that is worthy? How
to survive in a world which is no longer addicted to neces-
sary progress? Are we really reborn through love? If so or
if not, how to live with the cardinal fact of death?

But these new writers will have grown up among the
specters of passivity, isolation, and doubt which haunt
American political and family life. Passive self-absorption
is surely the great antagonist of the creating mind. Unless
others respond to the "moving image of desire/' the writer
does not really have a command post; he is in isolation,

FICTION OF THE SIXTIES 113

no matter how shrilly he raises his voice. The writer of the
sixties will have to thread his way through the interlocking
loneliness of contemporary America, If he accepts the
ticket for the Fun House maze, where all he can make
out is his own reflection in thousands of mirrors, he fails.

Dare anyone promise that fiction writers in the sixties
will discover the causal connection between their work and
our society, the impulse to make a self-engrossing music
and the need to tell the best truth a man knows? Of course
not. The first difficulty is that the imaginative writer is
not that unacknowledged legislator which his dream as a
young man tells him to be; he may find himself in "short
supply/' but the occasional accident of best-sellerdom bears
little relationship to a powerfully attentive audience. He
is, rather, an acknowledged nonlegislator. But more im-
portant than the personal career disconnection of the
writer is the fact that he suffers like the rest of Americans,
at three o'clock in the morning and all day long, individu-
ally and as a people, with the need to find a significant
connection between desire and love, ambition and work,
principle and actual function in the largest world. \\Tiat,
as a people, we lack of the large public issues of spirit and
purpose, the novelists in their narrow rooms can hardly
provide.

Then what will they give us in the sixties? At their
strongest, they can offer relish even in trouble, freshness
even in chagrin; they can tell us stories about how things
are, how they might be; they can create heroes who point
to better chances through being tested in extremity. They
can refresh the sense of personality and remind us that
the mysterious pride in self is more than the lining to our
striving or cajoling public faces. If tragedy lies buried in
a ruck of pathos, they can still show us where tragedy lies
buried. This is familiar work for the novel, but it must be
done afresh every time.

At their frazzled worst, novelists will continue to give us

- 114 * THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

the ephemera which inspire us to a constant activity of for-
getting. The juvenile delinquent will remain loyally with us,
as he has since Zeus made so much trouble for Kronos at
dinner, but the hipster will fold his hypodermic and silently
steal away; though no one can replace Jack Kerouac, the no
one's name will be legion. The thick book-club novel, fash-
ioned by steady hand and indifferent heart, and the thin in-
terior decorator's novel, fashioned by the desire to pitch a
camp in the tent of literature, will produce their accustomed
results in the form of dollars and social status. The self-ab-
sorbed outpouring which sometimes precedes a controlled
gift and sometimes precedes silence and oblivion will con-
tinue to find optimistic publishers and tireless but fatigued
reviewers. The weekly great book about America's Mission
will detonate ecstasies by the familiar missionaries.

The new serious writers will find an inadequate substi-
tute for the moral equivalent of the traditional life-and-
death struggles in the coming-of-age novel and the
suburban novel and the business novel and the exposure-
of-selling-out novel. The novel of political and social protest
must find new energies; it is difficult to be as attentive to
Margaret Mead, telling American men to unite as Men,
as one was to Karl Marx, telling us to unite as Workers.
Though the alarmed viewers of American family life have a
pertinent "issue/' "problem," "question," it does not sug-
gest the bedrock challenge of the apparent breakdown of
an economic system in the thirties. Can there be a powerful
general cause for the writers of the sixties, apart from their
personal need to tell a story?

The vital accommodations to reality and demands
upon experience will, I think, present themselves with a
force that must change our sense of the American novel.
The first question is moral, philosophical, metaphysical,
religious; the second, linked with it like a Siamese twin,
has political roots. How does a man place himself as a

FICTION OF THE SIXTIES 115 -

person in the coming new world? How will Americans ac-
commodate to this world as a people?

Part of the novelist's purpose has always been to pre-
sent possibilities, to judge, to decide, and to give a weight;
assurance, style, and energy to these decisions. In the
sixties the best novelists will grapple with a problem which
can be pejoratively described as "abstract" but which in-
volves a return in extremity to the deepest poetic demand:
to know.

They will ask final questions: For whom do I live?
For what? They will search out examples of personal value
in a massified society: What is the relationship between
freedom and isolation, loneliness and independence, re-
sponsibility and that pseudo responsibility of merely follow-
ing orders? Stripped down to poetry and story and the in-
auguration of passionate conviction, they will leave the
self-conscious recording of the details of social life to the
social historians; the "research team/ 7 that miniature lonely
crowd, is better equipped to perform this interesting but
secondary function.

Because the novelist relishes what is, he will continue
to find joy in the bizarreries of talk and the salient observa-
tion, but he will, I believe, look for a specific coherence
in much the way that philosophers and religious thinkers
traditionally have done. He will do this partly because the
linguistic analysis of contemporary philosophy and the
sermons of contented religiosity leave the primary questions
unanswered. The writer who fought in Spain did nothing
more than sign a petition for Hungary, but he must find
a way to translate his ardent moral judgments into literary-
meaning in time of shock and crisis.

And the sixties will surely be a time of shock and crisis,
sensed by the artists even if the mass of Americans do not
admit it. (When a body is first wounded badly, it does
not feel the pain.) The novelist obliges himself to confront
the individual's changed relationship toward himself and

* 116 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

a mass society; his changed assignment of duty will also
be the result of two important political facts built into
the texture of American life out of which the novel of
the sixties will emerge. The first fact, relatively easy to
accept, is that America is neither the great villain of mass
civilization nor the wistful hope of the world. American
self4ove and self-romanticization have jaded along with the
self-hatred of the Anglophile or the Marxist myths. The
second, more difficult realization has to do not with patri-
otic indulgence but with power. The United States is
no longer the young giant (peace to Thomas Wolfe); it
will be one giant among at least three, including China and
Russia and perhaps India and perhaps some European
complex. The drama and images of American novels will
either be reconciled with these facts or unreconciled, but
fiction always shows the effect of its nourishment by facts.

Let us follow this notion in one detail: If we accept
the reality of Chinese power, we will begin to trade with
China. If we trade with China, San Francisco will rival
New York as a great port and center of cultural radiation.
And when this occurs, the magnetic attraction of New
York City for novelists may well be succeeded by the image
of another city, in which European and Oriental influences
are combined as Western and Byzantine influences were
combined during the glory of Vienna. The St. Lawrence
Seaway makes Cleveland, Ohio, an ocean port, with French
sailors strolling up Ninth Street Jet planes will take Huck
Finn to Moscow from Hannibal, Mo., in only a few
hours. The map of the world is part of every novel. Even
without hydrogen explosions to break up continents, the
tidal waves of transport and trade and the erupting vol-
canoes of national power will create a new mental geog-
raphy and a new need for coherence in the sixties.

Rhetoric and the shape of speech itself must reflect
these tidal changes. A small example: If Saul Bellow were
writing The Victim now, the sentence which begins the

FICTION OF THE SIXTIES 117 *

book, in which he describes New York as 'Tiot as Bangkok/*
would carry less of the fantastic Arabian Nights associa-
tions which it had for the writer ten years ago; he knows
people who have been to Bangkok, he may go there him-
self, Bangkok is there as a part of the hard life of the times.

Fiction in the sixties will be bent to celebration of a
world magnificently on edge, at the limit; while perhaps
free in fact of economic crisis and war, we will remain
under ultimate threat, with implications of being chastened
for error by the disappearance of men from the earth.
Avowing the facts of man's ambiguous destiny, the writer
will try to give his private vision some viable control. He
will often stumble, often settle for shrillness. Many
thoughtful writers will create out of total mastery and
partial awe. That is, they will know too much, or at least
think too highly of their partial knowledge; brain-proud,
convinced, combative, and making points, they will prune
their effective awe before the brute gift of life on earth.
The supple and compassionate mind is essential; knowl-
edgeability is the enemy of awe, that sun under which
the artist's wisdom turns and grows.

The best writers of the sixties, as of all periods in
history, will suffer gladly under partial mastery, being
gripped by strong convictions and total awe. The novelist's
ideas will finally be stopped before the greatest idea of all
for a writer of fiction, the fact that his people live and
that what they do is important; in other words, before
his awe at the spectacle of human love and sorrow, folly
and dignity. Having thought, the novelist will then suspend
thinking and go into the kitchens, the streets, and the
dilemmas of his fictive world. Once again he will discover
actions, themes, styles, and forms which enable him to
do that labor which must be performed afresh for every
time, finding an exemplary reality in the true lie which is a
story.

1960

A Dog in Brooklyn, a Girl in Detroit:
A Life among the Humanities

BETTER CAREER for a boy who seeks to unravel the
meaning of our brief span on earth than that of phi-
losopher? We all wonder darkly, in the forbidden hours
of the nigh^ punishing our parents and building a better
world, with undefined terms. Soon, however, most of us
learn to sleep soundly; or we take to pills or love-making;
or we call ourselves insomniacs, not philosophers. A few
attempt to define the terms.

There is no code number for the career of philosophy
in school, the Army, or out beyond in real life. The man
with a peculiar combination of melancholic, nostalgic, and
reforming instincts stands at three possibilities early in
his youth. He can choose to be a hero, an artist, or a
philosopher. In olden times, war, say, or the need to clean
out the old West, might make up his mind for him. The
old West had been pretty well cleaned up by the time
I reached a man's estate, and Gary Cooper could finish
the job. Heroism was an untimely option. With much

118 *

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 119

bureaucratic confusion I tried a bit of heroic war, got stuck
in the machine, and returned to the hectic, Quonset
campus of the GI Bill, burning to Know, Understand, and
Convert. After a season of ferocious burrowing in books,
I was ready to be a Teacher, which seemed a stern neighbor
thing to Artist and Philosopher. I took on degrees, a Ful-
bright fellowship, a wife, a child, a head crammed with
foolish questions and dogmatic answers despite the English
school of linguistic analysis. I learned to smile, pardner,
when I asked questions of philosophers trained at Oxford
or Cambridge, but I asked them nonetheless, I signed
petitions against McCarthy, wrote a novel, went on a
treasure hunt, returned to my roots in the Middle West
and stood rooted there, discussed the menace of the mass
media, and had another child.

By stages not important here, I found myself teaching
the Humanities at Wayne University in Detroit. I am now
going to report a succession of classroom events which,
retrospectively, seems to have determined my abandonment
of formal dealing with this subject The evidence does not,
however, render any conclusion about education in the
"Humanities" logically impregnable. It stands for a state
of mind and is no substitute for formal argument How-
ever, states of mind are important in this area of experi-
ence and metaexperience. However and however: it
happens that most of the misty exaltation of the blessed
vocation of the teacher issues from the offices of deans,
editors, and college presidents. The encounter with class-
room reality has caused many teachers, like Abelard
meeting the relatives of Eloise, to lose their bearings. Never-
theless this is a memoir, not a campaign, about a specific
life in and out of the Humanities. Though I am not a
great loss to the History of Everything in Culture, my own
eagerness to teach is a loss to me.

120 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

News item of a few years ago. A young girl and her
date are walking along a street in Brooklyn, New York.
The girl notices that they are being followed by an
enormous Great Dane. The dog is behaving peculiarly,
showing its teeth and making restless movements. A mo-
ment later, sure enough, the dog, apparently maddened,
leaps slavering upon the girl, who is borne to earth be-
neath its weight. With only an instant's hesitation, the
boy jumps on the dog. Its fangs sunk first in one, then
in the other, the dog causes the three of them to roll like
beasts across the sidewalk.

A crowd gathers at a safe distance to watch. No one
interferes. The becalmed curiosity of teevee viewers.

A few moments later a truckdriver, attracted by the
crowd, pulls his vehicle over to the curb. This brave man
is the only human being stirred personally enough to
leave the role of passive spectator. Instantaneously ana-
lyzing the situation, he leaps into the struggle attacking
and beating the boy. He has naturally assumed that the dog
must be protecting an innocent young lady from the un-
seemly actions of a juvenile delinquent

I recounted this anecdote in the classroom in order
to introduce a course which attempted a summary experi-
ence of Humanities 610 for a monumental nine credits.
There were a number of points to be made about the
passivity of the crowd ("don't get involved," "not my busi-
ness") and the stereotypical reaction of the truck driver
who had been raised to think of man's best friend as not
another human being but a dog. In both cases, addicted
to entertainment and cliches, the crowd and the trucker
could not recognize what was actually happening before
their eyes; they responded irrelevantly to the suffering of
strangers; they were not a part of the maine. This led us

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 121

to discussion of the notion of "community." In a closely
knit society, the people on the street would have known
the couple involved and felt a responsibility toward them.
In a large city, everyone is a stranger. (Great art can give
a sense of the brotherhood of men. Religion used to do this,
too.) "Any questions?" I asked, expecting the authority of
religion to be defended.

An eager hand shot up. Another. Another. Meditative
bodies sprawled in their chairs. "Are all New Yorkers like
that?" "Well, what can you do if there's a mad dog and
you're not expecting it?" "Where does it say in what great
book how you got to act in Brooklyn?"

I took note of humor in order to project humorous-
ness. I found myself composing my face in the look of
thought which teevee panelists use in order to project
thinking. I discovered a serious point to elaborate several.
I mentioned consciousness and relevance and the undefined
moral suggestion implied by the labor which produces any
work of art or mind. A girl named Clotilda Adams asked
me: "Why don't people try to get along better in this
world?"

Somewhat digressively, we then discussed the nature
of heroism, comparing the behavior of the boy and the
truck driver. Both took extraordinary risks; why? We broke
for cigarettes in the autumn air outside. Then, for fifty
minutes more, we raised these interesting questions, re-
ferring forward to Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Dostoevski,
Tolstoi, William James, and De Gaulle; and then boy, dog,
girl, truck driver, and crowd were left with me and the
crowned ghosts of history in the deserted room while my
students went on to Phys Ed, Music Appreciation, Sosh,
and their other concerns. Having been the chief speaker,
both dramatist and analyst, I was exalted by the lofty
ideas floated up into the air around me. I was a little let
down to return to our real life in which dog-eat-dog is

122 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

power, and certainly not wisdom, provided the goal of my
students. Not even wealth was the aim of most of them.
They sought to make out, to do all right, more prideful
than amorous in love, more security-hungry than covetous
in status. I saw my duty as a teacher: Through the Human-
ities, to awaken them to the dream of mastery over the facts
of our lives; I saw my duty plain: Through the Humanities,
to lead them toward the exaltation of knowledge and the
calm of control. I had a whole year in which to fulfill this
obligation. It was a two-semester course.

Before she left the room, Clotilda Adams said, "You
didn't answer my question." Fact.

Outside the university enclave of glass and grass,
brick and trees, Detroit was agonizing in its last big year
with the big cars. Automation, dispersion of factories, and
imported automobiles were eroding a precarious confi-
dence. Fear was spreading; soon the landlords would offer
to decorate apartments and suffer the pain. Detroit remem-
bered the war years with nostalgia. Brave days, endless
hours, a three-shift clock, insufficient housing, men sleeping
in the all-night, triple-feature movies on Woodward and
Grand River. Though the area around the Greyhound and
Trailways stations was still clotted with the hopeful out of
the hill country of the midsouth and the driven from the
deep South they strolled diagonally across the boulevards,
entire families holding hands some people suspected what
was already on its way down the road: twenty per cent un-
employment in Detroit.

The semester continued. We churned through the
great books. One could classify my students in three gen-
eral groups, intelligent, mediocre, and stupid, allowing for
the confusions of three general factors background, ca-
pacity, and interest. This was how we classified the Hu-
manities, too: ancient, medieval, and modern. It made a
lot of sense, and it made me itch, scratch, and tickle.
Series of three-form nice distinctions. According to Jung

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 123 -

and other authorities, they have certain mythic signifi-
cances. The course was for nine credits. All the arts were
touched upon. We obeyed Protagoras; man, just man, was
our study. When I cited him "Man is the measure of all
things" Clotilda Adams stirred uneasily in her seat: "By
which Protagoras no doubt meant Woman, too/' I assured
her. She rested.

Now imagine the winter coming and enduring, with
explosions of storm and exfoliations of gray slush, an
engorged industrial sky overhead and sinus trouble all
around. The air was full of acid and a purplish, spleeny
winter mist Most of Detroit, in Indian times before the
first French trappers arrived, had been a swamp and below
sea level. The swamp was still present, but invisible; city
stretched out in all directions, crawling along the high-
ways. Though Detroit was choked by a dense undergrowth
of streets and buildings, irrigated only by superhighways,
its work was done with frantic speed. The Rouge plant
roared, deafened. The assembly lines clanked to the limit
allowed by the UAW. The old Hudson factory lay empty,
denuded, waiting to become a parking lot. Then the new
models were being introduced! Buick! Pontiac! Dodge!
Ford and Chevrolet! Ford impudently purchased a huge
billboard faced toward the General Motors Building on
Grand Boulevard. General Motors retaliated by offering
free ginger ale to all comers, and a whole bottle of Vernor's
to take home if you would only consent to test-drive the
new Oldsmobile, the car with the. . . . I've forgotten what
it had that year. All over town the automobile companies
were holding revival meetings; hieratic salesmen preached
to the converted and the hangers-back alike, lines at the loan
companies stretched through the revolving doors and out
onto the winter pavements. But many in those lines were
trying to get additional financing on their last year's cars.
The new models were an indifferent success despite all the
uproar of display and Detroit's patriotic attention to it.

124 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

Searchlights sliced up the heavens while the city lay under
flu.

Teachers at Wayne University soon learn not to tease
the American Automobile. Lese Chrysler was a moral of-
fense, an attack on the livelihood and the sanctity of the
American garage. Detroit was a town in which men looked
at hubcaps as men elsewhere have sometimes looked at
ankles. The small foreign car found itself treated with a
violent Halloween kidding-on-the-square, scratched, bat-
tered, and smeared (another Jungian series of three!). A
passionate and sullen town, Detroit had no doubts about
its proper business. All it doubted was everything else.

I often failed at inspiring my students to do the as-
signed reading. Many of them had part-time jobs in the
automobile industry or its annexes. Even a Philosopher
found it difficult to top the argument, "I couldn't read
the book this week, I have to worfe," with its implied
reproach for a scholar's leisure. But alas, many of these
stricken proletarians drove freshly minted automobiles.
They worked in order to keep up the payments, racing like
laboratory mice around the cage of depreciation. Certain
faculty deep thinkers, addicted to broad understanding
of the problems of others, argued that these students were
so poor they had to buy new cars in order to restore their
confidence. The finance companies seemed to hear their
most creative expressions, not me. Deep in that long De-
troit winter, I had the task of going from the pre-Socratic
mystics all the way to Sartre, for nine credits. Like an
audio-visual monkey, I leaped from movie projector to rec-
ords to slides, with concurrent deep labor in book and
tablet. We read The Brothers Karamazov, but knowing
the movie did not give credit. We studied "The Waste
Land," and reading the footnotes did not suffice. We
listened to Wanda Landowska play the harpsichord on
records. We sat in the dark before a slide of Seurat's
"La Grande Jatte" while I explained the importance of the

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES * 125 -

measles of pointillisme to students who only wanted to
see life clear and true, see it comfortably. Clotilda Adams
said that this kind of painting hurt her eyes. She said
that there was too much reading for one course "piling
it on. This isn't the only course we take." She said that she
liked music, though. All Moses had to do was to bring the
Law down the mountain to the children of Israel; I had to
bring it pleasingly.

We made exegeses. I flatly turned down the request of
a dean that I take attendance. As a statesmanlike com-
promise, I tested regularly for content and understanding.

Then, on a certain morning, I handed back some quiz
papers at the beginning of class. Out on the street, a main
thoroughfare through town, it was snowing; this was one
of those magical days of late winter snowfall pale, cold,
clean, and the entire city momentarily muffled by the
silence of snow. The room hissed with steam heat; a smell
of galoshes and mackinaws arose from the class. "Let us
not discuss the test let us rise above grades. Let us try
to consider nihilism as a byproduct of the Romantic re-
vival " I had just begun my lecture when an odd clashing,
lumping noise occurred on Cass Avenue. "Eliot's later
work, including 'The Four Quartets/ which we will not
discuss here. . . ."

But I was interrupted by a deep sigh from the class.
A product of nihilism and the romantic revival? No. It
was that strange tragic sigh of horror and satisfaction. Out
in the street, beyond the window against which I stood,
a skidding truck had sideswiped a taxi. The truckdriver
had parked and gone into a drugstore. The cab was mashed
like a cruller. From the door, the driver had emerged,
stumbling drunkenly on the icy road, holding his head.
There was blood on his head. There was blood on his
hands. He clutched his temples. The lines of two-way
traffic, moving very slowly in the snow and ice, carefully
avoided hitting him. There were streaks of perforated and

* 126 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

patterned snow, frothed up by tires. He was like an island
around which the sea of traffic undulated in slow waves;
but he was an island that moved in the sea and held hands
to head. He slid and stumbled back and forth, around and
about his cab in the middle of the wide street He was
in confusion, in shock. Even at this distance I could see
blood on the new-fallen snow. Drivers turned their heads
upon him like angry Halloween masks, but did not get
involved. Snow spit at his feet

No one in the class moved. The large window through
which we gazed was like a screen, with the volume turned
down by habit, by snow, by a faulty tube. As the teacher,
my authority took precedence. I ran out to lead the cab
driver into the building. An elderly couple sat huddled in
the car, staring at the smashed door, afraid to come out
the other. They said they were unhurt.

I laid the man down on the floor. He was bleeding
from the head and his face was a peculiar purplish color,
with a stubble of beard like that of a dead man. There was
a neat prick in his forehead where the union button in his
cap had been driven into the skin. I sent a student to call
for an ambulance. The cab driver's color was like that
of the bruised industrial sky, "You be okay till the am-
bulance ?"

Foolish question. No alternative. No answer.

We waited. The class was restless. When they weren't
listening to me, or talking themselves, or smudging blue
books in an exam, they did not know what to do in this
room devoted to the specialized absorption of ideas. Si-
lence. Scraping of feet, crisping of paper. We watched the
slow-motion traffic on the street outside.

The cab driver moved once in a rush, turning over
face down against the floor, with such force that I thought
he might break his nose. Then slowly, painfully, as if in
a dream, he turned back and lay staring at the ceiling. His
woolen lumberjacket soaked up the blood trickling from

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 127

one ear; the blood traveled up separated cilia of wool,
which drew it in with a will of their own. There was a
swaying, osmotic movement like love-making in the eager
little wisps of wool. An astounded ring of Humanities 610
students watched, some still holding their returned quiz
papers. One girl in particular, Clotilda Adams, watched
him and me with her eyes brilliant, wet, and bulging, and
her fist crumpling the paper. I tried by imagining it to
force the ambulance through the chilled and snowfallen
city. I saw it weaving around the injured who strutted
with shock over ice and drift, its single red Cyclops' eye
turning, the orderlies hunched over on benches, chewing
gum and cursing the driver. The ambulance did not arrive.
Clotilda Adams' eye had a thick, impenetrable sheen over
it. She watched from the cab driver to me as if we were
in some way linked When would the authorities get there?
When the medics? There must have been many accidents
in town, and heart attacks, and fires with cases of smoke
inhalation.

Before the ambulance arrived, the police were there.
They came strolling into the classroom with their legs
apart, as if they remembered ancestors who rode the plains.
Their mouths were heavy in thought. They had noses like
salamis, red and mottled with feL They were angry at
the weather, at the school, at the crowd, at me^ and espe-
cially at the prostrate man at our feet He gave them a
means to the creative expression of pique. (Everyone needs
an outlet.)

Now Clotilda Adams took a step backward, and I re-
call thinking this odd. She had been treading hard near
the pool of blood about the cab driver, but when the
cops strolled up, she drifted toward the outer edge of
the group of students, with a sly look of caution in her
downcast, sideways-cast eyes. Her hand still crisped at the
returned exam paper. This sly, lid-fallen look did not do
her justice. She was a hard little girl of the sort often

128 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

thought to be passionate skinny but well-breasted, a high
hard rump with a narrow curve, a nervous mouth.

The two policemen stood over the body of the cab
driver. They stared at him in the classic pose one cop
with a hand resting lightly on the butt of his gun and the
other on his butt, the younger cop with lips so pouted
that his breath made a snuffling sound in his nose. They
both had head colds. Their Ford was pulled up on the
snow-covered lawn outside, with raw muddled marks of
tread in the soft dirt. When the snow melted, there would
be wounded streaks in the grass. The cab driver closed
his eyes under the finicking, distasteful examination. At last
one spoke: "See your driver's license/'

The cab driver made a clumsy gesture toward his
pocket. The cop bent and went into the pocket. He flipped
open the wallet, glanced briefly at the photographs and
cash, glanced at me, and then began lipreading the license.

The cab driver was in a state of shock. There was
a mixture of thin and thick blood on his clothes and
messing the floor. "This man is badly hurt/' I said. "Can't
we get him to the hospital first?'*

"This is only your driver license," the cop said slowly,
having carefully read through Color of Hair: Brn, Color of
Eyes: Brn, and checked each item with a stare at the
man on the floor. "Let me see your chauffeur license."

"He's badly hurt/' I said. "Get an ambulance."

"Teach," said the older cop, "you know your business?
We know ours."

"It's on the way," said the other. "Didn't you call it
yourself?"

"No, one of the students ..." I said.

He grinned with his great victory. "So don't you
trust your pupils neither?"

Shame. I felt shame at this ridicule of my authority
in the classroom. A professor is not a judge, a priest, or a
sea captain; he does not have the right to perform mar-

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 129 *

riages on the high seas of audio-visual aids and close
reasoning. But he is more than an intercom between stu-
dent and fact; he can be a stranger to love for his students,
but not to a passion for his subject; he is a student himself;
his pride is lively. The role partakes of a certain heft and
control. There is power to make decisions, power to abstain,
power to bewilder, promote, hold back, adjust, and give
mercy; power, an investment of pride, a risk of shame.

Clotilda Adams, still clutching her exam, stared at
me with loathing. She watched me bested by the police.
She barely glanced, and only contemptuously, at the man
bleeding from the head on the floor. She moved slightly
forward again in order to participate fully in an action
which apparently had some important meaning for her.
She had lost her fear of the police when she saw how we all
stood with them. The limits were established.

The police were going through the cab driver's
pockets. They took out a folding pocket knife and cast
significant looks at it and at each other. It had a marbled
plastic hilt, like a resort souvenir. It was attached to a key
ring.

"Hey!" one said to the half-conscious man. "What's
this knife for?"

"Where'd you get them keys?" the other demanded,
prodding the cabbie with his toe.

"A skeleton key. These cab companies," one of the
cops decided to explain to Clotilda Adams, who was stand-
ing nearby, "they get the dregs. Hillbillies, you know?"

I said nothing, found nothing to say. I now think
of Lord Acton's famous law, which is accepted as true
the way it was uttered. The opposite is also true the
commoner's way: Having no power corrupts; having ab-
solutely no power corrupts absolutely.

The bleeding seemed to have stopped. The cab
driver sat up, looking no better, with his bluish, greenish,
drained head hanging between his knees. His legs were

130 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

crumpled stiffly. He propped himself on his hands. The
police shot questions at him. He mumbled, mumbled, ex-
plained, explained.

"How long you been in Detroit? How come you come
out of the mountains?"

"Why you pick up this fare?"

"What makes you think Cass is a one-way street?"

Mumbling and mumbling, explaining and explaining,
the cab driver tried to satisfy them. He also said: "Hurt.
Maybe you get me to the hospital, huh? Hurt real bad."

"Maybe," said one of the cops, "maybe we take you
to the station house first. That boy you hit says reckless
driving. I think personally you'd flunk the drunk test
what you think, Teach?"

I sent one of the students to call for an ambulance
again. In the infinitesimal pause between my suggestion
and his action, an attentive reluctant expectant caesura,
I put a dime in his hand for the call. One of the cops
gave me that long look described by silent movie critics
as the slow burn. "They drive careful," he finally said. "It's
snowing. They got all that expensive equipment."

The snow had started again outside the window.
The skid marks on the lawn were covered. Though the
sky was low and gray, the white sifting down gave a peace-
ful village glow to this industrial Detroit. Little gusts
barely rattled the windows. With the class, the cops, and
the driver, we were living deep within a snowy paper-
weight. I felt myself moving very slowly, swimming within
thick glass, like the loosened plastic figure in a paperweight
The snow came down in large torn flakes, all over the
buildings of Wayne University, grass, trees, and the pale
radiance of a network of slow-motion superhighways be-
yond. Across the street, a modern building glass and alu-
minum strips lay unfinished in this weather. Six months
ago there had been a student boarding house on that
spot, filled with the artists and the beat, the guitar-wielders

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 131

and the modern dancers, with a tradition going all the way
back to the Korean War. Now there were wheelbarrows
full of frozen cement; there were intentions to build a
Japanese garden, with Japanese proportions and imported
goldfish,

My student returned from the telephone. He had
reached a hospital

The cab driver was fading away. Rootlets of shock
hooded his eyes: the lid was closing shut. A cop asked
him another question what the button on his cap stood
for it was a union button and then the man just went
reclining on his elbow, he slipped slowly down, he lay in
the little swamp of crusted blood on the floor. You know
what happens when milk is boiled? The crust broke like
the crust of boiled milk when a spoon goes into coffee.
The cop stood with a delicate, disgusted grimace on his
face. What a business to be in, he seemed to be thinking.
In approximately ten years, at age forty-two, he could re-
tire and sit comfortable in an undershirt, with a nonre-
turnable can of beer, before the color teevee. He could
relax. He could start to relax. But in the meantime nag,
nag, nag. Drunk cabbies, goddamn hillbillies. The reckless
driver on the floor seemed to sleep. His lips moved. He was
alive.

Then a puffing intern rushed into the room. I had
not heard the ambulance. The policeman gave room and
the intern kneeled. He undid his bag. The orderlies glanced
at the floor and went back out for their stretcher.

I stood on one side of the body, the kneeling intern
with his necklace of stethescope, and the two meditative
cops. On the other side was the group of students, and at
their head, like a leader filled with wrath, risen in time
of crisis, stood Clotilda Adams, still clutching her exam
paper. There were tears in her eyes. She was in a fury.
She had been thinking all this time, and now her thinking
had issue: rage. Over the body she handed me a paper,

132 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

crying out, "I don't think I deserved a D on that quiz.
I answered all the questions, I can't get my credit for Philo
of Ed without I get a B off you."

I must have looked at her with pure stupidity on my
face. There is a Haitian proverb: Stupidity -won't kill you,
but it'll make you sweat a lot. She took the opportunity to
make me sweat, took my silence for guilt, took my open-
mouthed gaze for weakness. She said: "If I was a white
girl, you'd grade me easier."

Guilt, a hundred years, a thousand years of it; pity
for the disaster of ignorance and fear, pity for ambition
rising out of ignorance; adoration of desire; trancelike
response to passion passion which justifies itself because
passionate. ... I looked at her with mixed feelings. I could
not simply put her down. In order to put down, your
own mind must be made up, put down. She had beauty
and dignity, stretched tall and wrathful, with teeth for
biting and eyes for striking dead.

"But I know my rights," she said, "Mister. My mother
told me about your kind lent my father money on his car
and then hounded him out of town. He been gone since
fifty-three. But you can't keep us down forever, no sir,
you can't always keep us down "

She was talking and I was yelling. She was talking
and yelling about injustice and I, under clamps, under
ice, was yelling in a whisper about the sick man. She was
blaming me for all her troubles, all the troubles she had
seen, and I was blaming her for not seeing what lay before
her, and we were making an appointment to meet in my
office and discuss this thing more calmly, Miss Adams.
Okay. All right. Later.

The police, the doctor, the orderlies, and the injured
cab driver were gone. The police car out front was gone
and the snow was covering its traces. The janitor came
in and swept up the bloodstains with green disinfectant
powder. The frightened couple in the cab were released.

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 133

They all disappeared silently into the great city, into the
routine of disaster and recovery of a great city. I dismissed
the class until tomorrow.

The next day I tried to explain to Miss Adams what
I meant about her failing to respond adequately to the
facts of our life together. Her mouth quivered. Yesterday
rage; today a threat of tears. What did I mean she wasn't
adequate? What did I know about adequate anyhow?
Nothing. Just a word. Agreed, Miss Adams. I was trying
to say that there were two questions at issue between us
her exam grade and her choice of occasion to dispute
it. I would like to discuss each matter separately. I tried
to explain why putting the two events together had dis-
turbed me. I tried to explain the notions of empirical
evidence and metaphor. I recalled, without successful com-
munication, the story of the young couple and the dog
in Brooklyn.

She did not see why she shouldn't have at least a B
on her quiz. Her back was strong, her head was high, she
didn't need to be compared to no black dog in Brooklyn.

Finally I urged her to have her exam looked at by the
head of the department, but she refused because she
knew in advance that he would support me. "White is
Right/' she said.

"Do you want to drop out of the class?"

"No. I'll stay," she said with a sudden patient, weary
acceptance of her fate. "Ill do what I can."

'Til do what I can too/' I said.

She smiled hopefully at me. She was tuckered out by
the continual alert for combat everywhere. She was willing
to forgive and go easy. When she left my office, this smile,
shy, pretty, and conventional, tried to teH me that she
could be generous a friend.

We had come to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke in
our tour through time and the river of humanities. I
pointed out that the English philosophers were noted for

134 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

clarity and eloquence of style. I answered this question:
The French? Isn't French noted for clarity? Yes, they too,
but they are more abstract. On the whole. In general.

The class took notes on the truths we unfolded to-
gether. Spring came and the snow melted. There was that
brief Detroit flowering of the new season jasmine and
dogwood which, something like it, must have captivated
the Frenchman, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, when he
paused on the straits of Detroit in 1701. University gar-
deners planted grass seed where the patrol car had parked
on the lawn. The new models, all except the Cadillac, were
going at mean discounts.

"The 'Humanities/" wrote Clotilda Adams in her
final essay, "are a necessary additive to any teacher's de-
velopment worth her 'salt' in the perilous times of today.
The West and the Tree World' must stand up to the war
of ideas against the Iron' Curtain." This was in answer
to a question about Beethoven, Goethe, and German
romanticism. She did not pass the course, but she was
nevertheless admitted on probation to the student-teacher
program because of the teacher shortage and the great need
to educate our children in these perilous times. Of today.

3

Humanities 610 provided ballast for the ship of cul-
ture as it pitched and reeled in the heavy seas of real life;
I lashed myself to the mast, but after hearing the siren
song of grand course outlines, I cut myself free and leaned
over the rail with the inside of my lip showing.

It would be oversimplifying to say that I left off
teaching Humanities merely because of an experience.
Such an argument is fit to be published under the title
"I Was a Teen-Age Humanities Professor/' I also left for
fitter jobs, more money, a different life. Still, what I remem-
ber of the formal study of Truth and Beauty, for advanced

A LIFE AMONG THE HUMANITIES 135

credit in education, is a great confusion of generalities,
committees, conferences, audio-visual importunities, and
poor contact "Contact!" cried the desperate deans and
chairmen, like radio operators in ancient war movies. And
much, much discussion of how to get through to the
students. How to get through? Miss Adams and Mr. Gold,
cab driver and Thomas Hobbes, policemen and the face-
less student who paused an instant for a dime for the
telephone we all have to discover how relevant we are
to each other. Or do we have to? No, we can merely perish,
shot down like mad dogs or diminished into time with no
more than a glimpse of the light

Words fade; our experience does not touch; we make
do with babble and time-serving. We need to learn the
meaning of words, the meaning of the reality those words
refer to; we must clasp reality close. We cannot flirt for-
ever, brown-nosing or brow-beating. We must act and
build out of our own spirits. How? How? We continually
need a new politics, new cities, new marriages and families,
new ways of work and leisure. We also need the fine old
ways. For me, the primitive appeal to pleasure and pain
of writing stories is a possible action, is the way in and
out again, as teaching was not. As a teacher, I caught my
students too late and only at the top of their heads, at the
raw point of pride and ambition, and I had not enough love
and pressure as a teacher to open the way through their
intentions to the common humanity which remains locked
within. As a writer, I could hope to hit them in their
bodies and needs, where lusts and ideals were murkily nur-
tured together, calling to the prime fears and joys directly,
rising with them from the truths of innocence into the
truths of experience.

The peculiar combination of ignorance and jadedness
built into most institutions is a desperate parody of per-
sonal innocence, personal experience. Nevertheless, educa-
tion, which means a drawing out even formal education,

136 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

a formal drawing out is a variety of experience, and experi-
ence is the only evidence we have. After evidence comes
our thinking upon it. Do the scientists, secreting their
honey in distant hives, hear the barking of the black dog
which follows them? Will the politicians accept the lead
of life, or will they insist on a grade of B in Power and
Dominion over a doomed race? We need to give proper
answers to the proper questions. I would like for myself
and everyone else to have more experience of the human-
ities.

Particular life is still the best map to truth. When
we search our hearts and strip our pretenses, we all know
this. Particular life we know only what we fenow. There-
fore the policemen stay with me: I have learned to despise
most authority. The cab driver remains in his sick bleed-
ing: pity for the fallen and helpless. And I think of Clotilda
Adams in her power and weakness; like the cops, she has
an authority of stupidity; like the victim of an accident,
she is fallen and helpless. But someplace, since we persist
in our cold joke against the ideal of democracy, the cops
still have the right to push people around, Clotilda is
leading children in the Pledge of Allegiance. We must find
a way to teach better and to learn.

1962

PART TWO

American Places

Paris: Notes from La Vie de Boheme

(Avec Tout Conforts)

THE FAMILIAR PARTAKES of revelation in a foreign place.
The traveler peeps with astounded eyes at Lobster d VAmer-
icaine and at the sum of his check in the land of cheap
living. The aggressive humility of the men taking sun in
a square, their necks as busy as those of birds in their collars:
these are the lunch-hour heliotropes of Columbus Circle
or the Cleveland Public Square, but in Paris they are
French. That a sign asks the tourist not to throw flowers
in the toilet: even this is Parisian charm. That the per-
formers at a private spectacle of sexual acrobatics afterwards
dress and shake hands with each of the American connois-
seurs of such chamber music: this is politesse, for the
French never leave a room without taking each right hand
in individual farewell. ("They say they're good friends/'
whispers a Marshall Plan secretary at tie departing backs
of the performing couple, "in real life/')

The old streets of an old city remind him of age,
and he returns to his hotel to dream again the nightmares
of childhood. The tourist, helpless and blind, returns to his

139

140 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

American infancy because he does not share that of those
about him; he goes to bed with mouth nibbling over guide-
book and phrasebook. Painfully awake during the first
months, used and played on, he is syncopated through
cunning variations into new rhythms and a questioning of
all habit. Bread, words, gestures, staircases, windows,
noises, the touch of linen, the smell of dust, the movement
of mouths and the muscles which come of new vowels, the
new laughter, the new anger, the new children and the very
new old people: these summon up once more the dreams
of fire, thickened air, and locked rooms mastered by the
young American bent on growing up.

A discovery: the possibility of movements of love and
hate from which merely his clothes, the little leap of an
American step, and the Maine-to-California smile on a
people who live in a morality of Happiness are enough
to exclude him. This protection weighs heavy on pride.
(An acquaintance at the Cafe Voltaire has offered three
thousand dollars for his passport.)

The months pass, and he learns to sleep again. For
the French he will always be le petit American, but the
risks of being a tourist are met He has his habits again. If
he still moves crabwise, and his eyes on stalks, through a
world whose meanings are lost to him, at least he has
enough money and a large enough amiability to be for-
given his sins, le pauvre petit, il vient d'arriver de
rAmerique, ah, out dors. You are from New-York, le
Theque-sas, or Ollywood? Est-ce vrai que le Coca-Cola
donne le cancer? He is likely to join the American Legion
(Paris Post), the Chamber of Commerce, the American
Students and Artists Club ('The Center"), buy a season's
ticket to the American Theatre, and search out the com-
pany of the retired fullback who has lived in Montparnasse
for three years while writing the biography of his football
coach. Naturally they discuss France, their remarks pres-

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME * HI *

aged by a certain conceit: "I have a French friend, and he
says "

The American notion about hospitality often dis-
engages the first sociological bludgeon for a hurt belaboring
of the French. After his initial enthusiasm about the cafe
as institution, annex to the family, the university, the
market place, and the bed, the American lonely for a
home begins to wonder why his new acquaintance always
proposes Les Oases or Chez Machin for their meetings
instead of inviting him to his apartment. He blames the
Parisian for a coldness and abstraction; he seems to seek
partitions, sparing himself the surrender of reserve implied
by the presence of the furniture of a life, which remind
him of his lies and sit in judgment on his off-hour dreams.
Leaving his new acquaintance, the American strolls the
streets at nightfall and listens to the definitive clacking of
shutters; one stretch and lean of those inside, and then
silence the family life of these others is blacked out by a
long habit of mistrust. Alone, he knows that in a similar
situation he would have invited the visitor home.

If he remains in Paris long enough for only four or
five meetings among the romantic nervosities of cafe life,
this is the judgment he will carry away: the Frenchman is
stifled in armor despite his talk and his insistence on
another drink, he lives behind locks, he is afraid of in-
timacy. "Le domicile est sacr f this phrase brings a pious
policeman glare to all faces. Despite its smell of food and
aperitifs, its benevolent ease of smoke and gossip, its
wickery luxury and its quick confidentiality, the deepest
sense of a cafe is discretion. For the discreet ones, cafe
life is the trapping on the armor, that tassel which distracts
an eye from the blade only if it has never seen one before.

After a time, however, his friend will send him a note
suggesting dinner for Saturday evening not at his home,
but at a restaurant. And then, finally, having accomplished

. 142 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

the ceremonials of late afternoon drinks and a long meal,
he will invite him apologetically to dine with his family.

"Is it true/' asks the astounded Parisian, "that in
America you can invite casual acquaintances to eat with
you at your own table, and then never see them again?"
a shudder at taking le domicile in vain. To him this ease
has the relation to responsible hospitality that the whine
and the sentiment of an American soldier's harmonica has
to real music. "Here/' he will explain, "an invitation to
my home for an evening meal means that you are be-
coming a part of my family, and if I fail to see you for a
week I will worry that you might be ill and come to ask
after you." He sees any intersecting of the circles of career,
pleasure, and the family as a bravado in a history hostile
to extravagant moral completions; a fatal and complicated
Eden is a joke in these times, yet French irony is such as
to play this joke at last as a fatality of remaining human.
With a self-conscious will that this must be and with
that smile playing on the nervy nodules of muscle of his
language made flesh the host offers you his home and
his friendship. If he rises from the table now and the
shutters clack to, it is to shut the others out

A constant in the reluctance of a Frenchman to let
you see his home is the economic X; almost all families
are aware of decline within their lifetimes, and the process
of gradual impoverishment has been a condition of
bourgeois life. Most Parisians live in shabbiness or real
poverty though they may perform work of skill and power.
Doomed to this, but not accepting it as have the Italians,
who live within the void of their public future and have
given up the justifications of power, there is the shame
of those recently fallen. They dwell in urban responsi-
bilities without the use of urban pride. There is an impulse
to conceal the pulpy cushions and the children in clumsy
shoes.

But this only contributes to a cultural fact which is

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME 143

consistent with the Parisian's life at every turn his
separation of family life from the life connected with his
work en ville, his impulse to keep his wife unsullied by
contact with his friends, his desire to master his family
and to guard its purity while he takes the risks of the wide
wide world. (Though his wife may have an ami whom
she meets in a cafe "from five to seven/' he is likely to
know outrage only if this appointment interferes with his
dinner: he never keeps his wife waiting while he returns
from his own petite amie.} The marriage of convenience,
retaining its propriety at least up until the last war,
is still frequent; the two categories of women wife-
mothers and petites-amies are accepted by most French-
men, who attend all-male schools from earliest childhood.
The attempt to assimilate women to "masculine" life
provides one of the cliches of French burlesque of America.
Skepticism about the possibility of monogamy associates
itself with an assumption all the more stern concerning
the sanctity of the home. Divorce is difficult and relatively
rare, but the back booths of the cafes are crowded in
the late afternoon with couples of all ages busy in their
cinq-cl-sept

What Bergson called morsellisation an anatomizing
of living event into affairs to be filed in compartments
has triumphed in Paris as it does in all commercial cultures.
False separations head off real susceptibilities. Everything
has its role, its proper moment, in the life of a free citizen;
the good life consists in turning up these proprieties a
mistress who knows her place, a moneychanger with sen-
sibilities and wit about his trade, a way of saving on taxes
and investing the gain abroad which does not interfere with
the important business of life at home on the rue du
Faubourg St-Honore. What are these important matters?
An economy of spirit is not everything, true; but a man
must recognize what is possible a recognition usually as-
sociated with the proper. Is there someone who disagrees?

. 144 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

"Mais la vie est comme gd, mon vieux. On a vegu, quoi"
This, the voice of the bourgeois, is the voice of the guardian
of all great capitals. He gives us the way of life which we
think of as enduring, the one which preserves values.
Naturally, the word vdue is understood ostensibly, doing
the service of the geographer's baton to point to something
outside time and men.

Morsellisation offers a sort of security, a logic and a
material which is acquiescent to planning and clever book-
keeping. This is a function the ransom of security and
dignity partially accomplished by money in America,
but in Paris even the metaphysical uses of money are
enfeebled by inflation. You can't save for a rainy day
when the concierge tells you that all umbrellas so far
known have snapped, rotted, leaked, or skittered off in the
first high wind. The French have lived for a long time with
governments that don't govern, with money that will not
buy tomorrow what it buys today, and in a place where
war may soon make human life worth even less than
money. The habits of dignity, which include the keeping
of secrets, help preserve the sense of dignity. The terrace
of an anonymous caf 6 near one of the many railway stations
can be under the April sun, under the September sun
the final home of all your uneconomical dreams. And
you can still offer yourself a rich-as-blood coup de rouge
for five or six cents.

Coy about it, hesitant and afraid, giving this gesture
of hospitality more weight than is necessary, the man to
whom the tourist has presented a letter of introduction
at last says: "So come at eight, can you? Will you?"

When a Parisian admits a friend to his home, some
of the charm of a cafe acquaintanceship passes; he is in-
troduced to the pleasures of a family, and to its troubles.
He has mounted the hierarchy of a culture built upon
class, tradition, and old troubled moralities, to a special
level of privilege and responsibility.

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME - 145

Most Americans in Europe prefer the frank generosity
offered by Italians. Few stay long enough to see France,
which displays the Louvre and Versailles, her splendid
false teeth rinsing in glass, because, not only a flirt, she
doesn't like to be looked at.

Nevertheless thousands of Americans remain in Paris.
Apart from those who come because of a job with the
government, private business, or one of the international
organizations for most of these Paris is an appendage
to the working day the largest group is still that of the
Bohemes, the experts on eternal truth and irregular hours.
The great run of American Bohemia is on the Left Bank,
its moral politics swinging from the conservative devotion
of the graduate students bent on tenure to the rabid
wobblyhood of the beboppers.

Samples: The student of dress designing (GI Bill)
whose mother sends him comic strips by airmail; the
plump damp timid Francophile all hot for the Life of
Art as a college French teacher, who earned the money
for his trip to Europe by selling pornographic postcards
obtained in Paris during the war; the six-foot-high gradu-
ate of Radcliffe who comes to Paris to write a dissertation
on John Donne and takes a BouT Mich' poet as lover
he tries to jump out the window when she first catches
him alone in his room, but is trapped in the scaffolding;
the litterateur who uses his wife's mother's money to court
poets and critics, fancying himself the poor student of
Flaubert and Mallarme but hiring a cook with a high
cauliflower hat when he invites his esthetic friends to
dinner. This one, having been an American in Paris for
four years, lives in a world of abstractions and gossip, cul-
ture and fierce incestuous rivalries with his local com-
patriots. He ambiguously trots between the ambition to
be accepted as court American in an "aristocratic" French
world and the sense of his ambition, which is to be invited

146 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

to the country house of Mme. X so that he can wear his
pride like a ribbon on his suede vest among his country-
men.

A once-successful radio writer decides that his money
will go farther among the expatriates of Paris. He has been
blacklisted and can no longer find work in New York, but
discovers a pleasant home and status among the American
political (not "cultural" or "racial") exiles. He listens to
recordings of Josh White and recalls his activist past with
a group of disconsolate entertainers and pouting journalists
with ambitions to eat magnificently and be in-the-know.
There is a comic opera pretense of plotting and "biding
our time" like Lenin in Switzerland but a secret con-
viction that the "working class" shares nothing of his
ideas, not even his opinions on jazz, and that his exile
is a matter of personal comfort.

The first four of this cast represent the Americans-
in-Paris of old. The cheap-livers, the lovers of Gaul, the
romantic and the social climbers, the refined amorists:
they were already here to greet Henry James, although the
institution has since been fecundated by a spill of American
public wealth in the form of fellowships, the GI Bill, and
so forth. French snobbery for Id vie Amtricaine (le Coca-
Cola, le Betty-Grable, le jazz-hot) has reached the level
where an American student can support himself by selling
hashish under the name of marijuana.

You still find at the D6me, the caf6 in which Heming-
way is said to have written some of the first Hemingway,
the bearded American artist he is for the ages who
suffers the audible anemia of a man who lives alone, that
clacking feebleness of the heart as he enters a room where
no one cares about him. Watch him mooch out the good
life, which is a tingle something like the sensation the
hand of the Luxembourg Gardens puppeteer must enjoy
under the skirt of Becassine. The serious drama of his
month is the exercise of dialectical skill with a Mont-

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME 147 *

parnasse whore, one of those singing mathematicians of
love. The next evening, playing the role of cynical grief
before her jiggle and her large-pursed bounce, he lights
her a Gauloise and leans away from the flame to take
the most dramatic light He moves on, our artist who
resists parody like the tubercular, as if he has some creative
other thought in his mind, but only as if; like the chroni-
cally ill, he has precisely nothing in constant and dutiful
attendance through the soft yellow-gray afternoons and
the chocolate evenings of the Left Bank. He may finally
assuage his solitude with some cute American girl barely
over the habit of circling her z's and fs, having fled the
textbook think-traps for the museum culture-traps. Drink
up, girls, for both love and wine will become more expen-
sive: and tomorrow you may be a teacher, or in nine
months a mother.

The love-wine-and-beauty bohemes, talking art and
abortion in Ivy League blue jeans "St. Francis is a
darling saint, so existentialist, I mean Freudianismly
speaking" still crowd the cafes but in a withering flock.
The new model has a research grant, a wife, a beret made
of the finest felt, and a vocabulary constructed of the
guaranteed latest cultural truths. His eyes run with the
yellow crud of scholarship and his pockets rustle with the
brittle lint of moving money. Far from Mimi and
Rodolphe, he accepts the responsibilities of success and the
American Century; he tries to cultivate his colleagues at
the Sorbonne and the College de France but finds them
politically immature, gives a frightened paterfamilias sniff
at the zazous of the Dupont Quartier Latin, and hurries
back to America so that his friends will not scramble past
him on the treadmill of university promotion. "They're
hard to get to know," he says of the French; which is,
besides, true.

The White Russians who trot after tourists to hiss
invitations to "an interesting scientific experience, Sir"

* 148 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

shake their heads over the last instance, the colony of
American political refugees. This group bring a new form
to American life abroad despite its links with the past:
those who settle in a foreign land because their politics
prevent their finding work and because they fear political
persecution. That, as individuals, they are mostly unclear
about what the heavy words political persecution can mean
does not lighten their fears. Their situation is complicated
by the efficiencies of modern politics. Some Americans
are refused passports to leave the States; others, once here,
have had their passports confiscated and have been sent
back by State Department, Embassy, or FBI order. An
indiscreet word in a cafe can travel far. "The American
passport is a privilege, not a right." There follow lyric cries
about a break for freedom in Czechoslovakia, but they
dutifully embark for their Manhattan apartments which
they have sublet for six months at a reasonable profit

Of the two most impressive of the younger French
writers, Jean Genet and Raymond Queneau, the first is an
orphan outlaw, a prudish homosexual thief and blackmailer
singing a moral invocation to what he is pleased to call
Evil; the second is a metaphysician of language finding
his sources in popular speech, a witty Pythagorean hoaxer
dead-earnest about his jokes, an inspired grammarian. Both
are intensely self-conscious artists, Genet descending willy
or nilly from a French literary tradition including Frangois
Villon and Balzac's Vautrin, Queneau an erudite working
at the lessons of Joyce; neither began by fitting the French
cultural ideal of the homme de lettres. Yet both are flutter-
ing through the wind tunnel of publicity and coterie-
thinking, those special obligations which have the effect
of shoving them past the matter of their effort into the
category of performing celebrities. This drafty passage
shimmers like the land of milk, honey, and tender justice
for visiting Americans. It's worth a look at least, leaving

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME 149

Jean Genet and Raymond Queneau to their proper reward,
which is to be read and not gossiped about. 1

What could be more luxurious than the ripe French
assimilation of the esthetic vocations to other professions?
Art is located in a world with structure and depth, like
the snail expertly buttered, spiced, and replaced in its shell;
competent writers are more important in Parisian life than
good cooks or even escargots de Bourgogne. This status
gives the quiet dignity of the Maison de la Societ6 des
Gens de Lettres (grass on the grounds, beards on the Gens)
the relation to American literary groups that the New York
Athletic Club has to an armpit-haunted Belleville public
bath. While in America, poetry (for example) is almost
always a solitary vice, clucked over in a family and a poor
recommendation to a landlord, in Paris the tradition can
make the writer as imposing a personage as Bing Crosby
in America or Princess Elizabeth in England. The Aca-
demic Frangaise, the Academic Goncourt, and lesser cor-
porations; the circles revolving about certain caf6s,
philosophies, reviews, publishing houses, and commanding
individuals; the prestige accorded a number of annual liter-
ary prizes greater than the number of variations on the
theme of the Rose Bowl; a public interest in writers un-
fettered by a reading of their works; such a social texture
in which is embedded the lonely joy of putting one word
after the next gives meaning to the designation homme
de lettres. It is more than a metier like another; it cor-
responds in the popukr imagination to the film and sport-

1 Queneau: LOOT de Reiril, Pierrot Mon Ami, Les Exercises de StyU 9
etc. Loin de Retdl has been published as The Skin of Dreams by New
Directions in an excellent translation by H. J. Kaplan.

Genet: Le Journal du Voleur, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Miracle de
la Rose, etc. Bernard Frechtman's translation of Our Lady of the Flowers
has been banned in the United States by the Douane Quixotes charged
with inspecting baggage and public virtue, but can be bought at exorbitant
prices from the usual bootleggers.

1962: Genet is now well-known as a playwright

150 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

ing aristocracy in America, the royal family in England,
and the bureaucratic demiurges of the Soviet Union.

In Paris culture is high on the heap. The politicians
and generals having defaulted, the champion cyclists turn-
ing out to be steady and Swiss or Italian and spectacular
up hills, the millionaires laying low or taking their money
on the lam into Argentina or the Chase Bank, the descend-
ants of Bourbon or Napoleonic royalty eking out a frugal
living by marrying Americans, the boxers KO'd in Detroit
and the chanteurs de charme senile or touring South Amer-
ica, the gang-stairs finding nothing left to rob but Egyptians,
Americans, and each other, it has come the turn of im-
mortal beauty & truth. Its practitioners hug the top of the
hierarchy; they wiggle often enough to merit the attention
of those below. Every culture needs a hero, and we select
our heroes in varied modes but worship them similarly. The
clothes, travels, witticisms, diseases, feuds, birthdays, and
amorous fortunes of such as Sartre, Cocteau, Gide, Mauriac,
Colette, Montherlant, Claudel, and the latest "Goncourt"
are discussed with the same loving attention in the French
press as those of Joan Crawford in a hieratic fan magazine.
The tucking of a napkin under the laureate's chin at a prize
dinner can be an event as crucial as the gestures of some
darling Broadway character. Everyone recognizes the ef-
figies among the wax figures of Joan of Arc and the two
Napoleons at the Muse Grevin. The light reading of a
Parisian office worker on the metro is likely to be his weekly
Figaro Litterdre, Opera, or Les Nouvelles Litterdres
three of a selection of artistic patisserie in comparison to
which the Saturday Review of Literature is weighty fodder.
Between the launching of an American battleship and a
parade in Red Square, the newsreels report Sartre lighting
his pipe in front of the Rose Rouge or Picasso throwing
sand at his wife on the beach at Antibes. (How anguished
is the flame! how masterful the sidearm sweep!)

Not a day passes without radio interviews of living

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME 151

writers or an "evocation" of a dead one. The interviews
are recorded and economically stored for later use, in
combination with "original music," as evocations. Death
masks, souvenir tag-ends of clothing or hair, and tender
anecdotes provide a living for the ghoul-critics and a thrill
for the rest of us, who thus partake of glory and buy the
memorial edition which includes Z's only unpublished
letter, in which he returned the unused portion of a round-
trip ticket to Lyon. Exhibitions in his honor will include,
besides the usual manuscripts, photographs, and letters,
household objects, baby shoes, and his hearing aid if pos-
sible.

When Gide died, reporters pursued Jean-Louis
Barrault, wearing a mussed toupee and carrying a bouquet
of violets, into the room where the body lay. So many
photographs of the master appeared that it seemed incredi-
ble that Gide, taken up by his duties as a model, could
ever have found time to write. The producer of a film
about him announced that he would not profiteer on the
publicity surrounding the death of his old friend and would
wait several weeks before releasing it. Besides, the editing
was not yet finished. One of the epidemic of tributes to
Gide everyone wrote one, and those who didn't were
approached for comment by Inquiring Reporters began:
"My intimate friend Andre Gide, whom I last saw in the
summer of 1937 . . ." Frangois Mauriac, after a lifelong
struggle against Gide's skepticism, sent him to purgatory
in his column in the Figaro, sparing him the expected
eternity of burning with a remark that, where he is now,
he is busy repenting of his errors. He justifies this lenient
sentence by invoking the religiosity to be found in Gide's
great joy in a solitary making of his world.

Writers and painters are news; they have status; it's
comfortable. There is no doubt about the diffusion of in-
terest in Picasso or Sartre in the newsreel theater, and some
of it may eventually be directed toward their work. Their

152 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

antics are enjoyed by others than their fraternity brothers.
Behind this popular interest in the arts, of course, lie com-
plex and serious justifications. The "classic" character of
the language and education, the continuity of a tradition,
the values and tensions created in the middle and upper
classes, the ambiguous relationship to the state and the
Church, and the special history and situation of a capital
such as Paris: these suggest some of the sources. There are
rewards for those who offer to fill the social function. But
there is a price for being institutionalized.

The price is paid in a danger of abdication of the two
great moral roles of the poet: the apocalyptic, which is the
will to possession by prophecy the divine afflatus and
the analytic, the examination of perspectives for a vision
of social texture. (Of course there are also other and less
moral reasons for any great poefs work.) The prophetic
calisthenics are flabbily performed by a man who, listed in
the business section of the telephone directory under
"Hommes de Lettres," awaits a call from a morning paper
to give his opinion on the latest cabinet crisis. The argu-
ment that, by becoming qua poet a respectable part of the
social structure, the man of letters gains a dramatic depth
of view is more seductive. The worm in this cheese is that
the job of a poet remains all the same a lonely one, one
not a corporate endeavor, self-separated from union, club,
and class, and only partaking of these respectabilities in
its most trivial aspects. The first work of creation does not
change essentially under the pressures of machine culture,
and the homme de lettres who feels that his craft can be
compared to the daily effort of a mason or a lawyer is living
a lie which will prevent his ever coming to a valid per-
spective on the lives of lawyers or masons. Literature is
not a career like another, despite the successful effort of
some writers toward comfort and a place; specialization
here makes experts but involves a subtle moral disqualifi-
cation. (Rimbaud foundered before a problem which in-

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME 153 *

eludes this one.) Even a weekly book review should be
a task essentially different from masonry.

Yet a poet cannot parade his exclusion as a private
right. Suffering (Ol le pauvre) is no longer the high privi-
lege of his cunning. Fifty years ago, when the issues of life
and death, love and power, were not yet identified with
work, mass populations, total governments, and total war,
it was still possible to sing songs of the greatest loneliness
and the greatest truth. That the reveries of a Sade, a Kafka,
or a Jarry now prove prophetic, demands of their heirs a
more responsible sharing in the dirty work of being human.
These others, thinking to speak for themselves or for tragic
ideals, were social historians of the highest order: often
a tribute to genius but worse luck for us in advance of
their society. Reading Alfred Jarry today we hear a rustle
of the ashes from the crematoriums, we watch a shift of
the frozen chemical shadows of Hiroshima, we fall among
the groans of the bodies in forced labor as these destroyed
creatures, who are only as guilty of being human as the
rest of us, join to cry out, 'Vive Ubu!" this, being no
longer merely a great joke, has a tendency forever to alter
the lonely estate of poetry. If Ubu Roi remains a burlesque
and a happy trick, well, that's a tribute to the will to life
in those left alive.

This is what we have given up for what we have
learned; it's a trick in which we no longer presume to use
masks. We must recognize ourselves among the actors;
we should still laugh. Here is the theater-in-the-round we
must dare to play in.

The dilemma for those who presume to speak for the
time left us is compounded by knowledge that participation
must imply a partial acquiescence in horrors, and yet only
in this hard yielding can disapproval have meaning. Neither
our disapproval nor any other judgment can annul our
participation. (I mean by "participation" a state of causal
involvement.) We're up to our necks. Not even Dante

154 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

had it that hard during the most responsible literary voyage
yet recorded. At least and from the beginning he had a
good chance to attain the third part of the trilogy, al-
though in our recollections of his tour he is mostly seen
fixed, and Virgil too, deep in the inferno and far from
divinity. Terza rima serves the technical uses of his lan-
guage better than it does the symbolic use predicted.

Still, by his deeds and by grace, he is confident of being
guided finally upward. Our world is busy telling us that
this is, alas, the life of Jewish vision: salvation, if at all,
here below.

In the end, because each demands a further responsi-
bility, either the isolation or the assimilation to other work
of the American writer (states having much in common)
seems preferable to the moral tout confort of Parisian
literary life. Isolated, the caustic of a man comes into full
play, despite the danger of an arty frothing, and one es-
sential characteristic of creative effort can be faced in its
extreme condition: its willed loneliness. Or, for a farmer
like Faulkner, a businessman like Wallace Stevens, or a
teacher like everyone else, the soreness of divided attention
acts against the knowledgeability of a conditional running
with the pack to make possible the flight of passion off
experienced fact which seems the only valid one the one
to which we still have a right.

Any remarks on this subject, however hortatory in
tone, can only work as a way of judging although they
may be stated as prescriptions. What la vie de boheme and
its partner in incest, the life of official art, imply is that the
writer's self-consciousness is enough. Such artists may grant
research its uses, a deliberate "experiencing"; they remain
incapable of the sort of responsible participation in society
which creates both persons and individuals. What the
writer writes about has to be something which he knows
not as an artist in addition to the special perspectives which

PARIS: NOTES FROM LA VIE DE BOHEME 155

he always brings to the matter of his life. Without this
causal involvement in some way as a nonartist, the special
consciousness of self suspended, he forfeits the possibility
of his eye-and-heart's ever having anything important but
itself to work on. This self -consciousness alone is important;
it is no longer sufficient, nor ever really was.

Everyone whimpers about the risks and obstacles to
life in America for the artist. There is no point in beating
the dead horse of American cultural immaturity; it will stay
as dead as usual. I want to suggest that, in a world like
ours, the risks of that cultural privilege which we like to
imagine for a golden age are greater and more grave than
the risks of faulty connections. That is, more grave for what
is essential to the artist: his first demand on himself to
know and to make. The golden age returns for but an
instant among the aroma of the madeleines while chatting
of Proust with a Gallimard editor at one of the afternoon
teas.

On the Boulevard St. Germain, near the Odeon, there
is a plaque indicating "The League for the Defense Against
the Enemies of Culture Second floor to the left."

Ne pas jeter des fteurs dans les aisances, S.V.P.

1951

Cleveland: Mation-on-the-Erie

"O CLEVELA3sn>, the Forest City! The Fountain City! O,
la Belle City!" cried a nineteenth-century newspaper editor,
visiting from Wisconsin with his French phrasebook and
his head full of wind. "Cleveland doesn't put enough garlic
in its cooking; it's no friend to food,'* complained the
twentieth-century wife of a professor at Western Reserve
University. "I like Cleveland because it's so nice to me/'
said a lovely young visitor with a New York road company
(waist 23, bust 34, hips 35), "with all its theaters and
goodwill and its new teevee channels opening up/*

The subject of these diverse meditations is the sixth
largest community in the nation, a metropolitan area of
about a million and a half, representing just one per cent
of the total population of the United States. It is the
world's center of paint manufacturing, and is said to con-
tain the largest Hungarian settlement outside the city limits
of Budapest, but is chiefly remarkable for its wealth and
its stability. Newspapers estimate that Cleveland had among
the largest average family incomes of the great American
cities last year about six thousand dollars. One of its

156-

CLEVELAND: INFLATION-ON-THE-ERIE 157

suburbs, Cleveland Heights, a community of sixty thou-
sand souls whose men coast eagerly downhill into the city
each morning and rise profitably amid a bumper-to-bumper
irritation each evening, boasts an average annual income
of about nine thousand dollars per family.

What does Cleveland do with its money?

It worries about it, as does everyone else. It wonders
whether the party will go on and it wonders why it isn't hav-
ing such a good time as it expected. There is a sense of
dream, as if one were to wander loose in a studio making
gen-u-ine counterfeit dollars. Some of the fantasts fresh to
the hiring of tax lawyers do not yet feel secure in this ma-
terialized dream. Most of us, however, are doing quite well,
thank you, from the art lover who recently settled between
one and two million dollars on an actress once the favorite
of Pirandello, to the lowliest policeman with a bingo
parlor or a bookie on his beat and an occasional all-expenses-
paid trip to Miami Beach.

Spread out strategically along Lake Erie between De-
troit and Buffalo, Cleveland sometimes refers to itself in
magazine advertisements as "the Best Location in the
Nation," with good rail, truck, and water communications,
a central position among raw materials and markets, and
a climate humid enough to spur on the inhabitants to
energetic activity in order to forget the nasal drip with
which a good proportion of us are inflicted. The members
of Moses Cleaveland's party who surveyed this territory
in 1796, ate delicious broiled rattlesnake and found both
commercial and esthetic delights in barter with the Indians,
but worried about "the subtil, baneful wind" off Lake Erie,
which led straight to death if breathed through the mouth.
Despite their fears, there has not been an epidemic, flood,
earthquake, volcanic eruption, or other serious act of God
except for the purchase by Bill Veeck of the Cleveland
Indians. Mr. Veeck has since moved on.

The water on a first-baseman's knee, the laryngitis of

. 138 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

a disc jockey, or another policeman surprised in an act
of burglary or venery while on duty provide the staple diet
of newspapers in quest of local catastrophe. Cleveland
policemen obey the Philosopher's great doctrine of the
Golden Mean between penuriousness (Atlantic City) and
profligacy (Beverly Hills), accepting just the amount re-
quired in favor and shakedown to send these commissioned
Aristotelians to Miami Beach, Coral Gables, and a proper
dignity in the sunset of their days. They are sometimes
punished for the excessive taking of bribes by a lonely duty
on the East Ninth Street pier, jutting onto Lake Erie, where
they are told to watch out for invaders from Canada. Any
time the Canadians want to take over, the Force can be
counted upon to turn its back if the fix be put in with a
minimal delicacy.

Cleveland is secure in steady employment, diversified
industry, and a profitable balance between war and civilian
production. Everything from television sets and chlorophyll
pills to gold bricks and honorary degrees has a good market
here. Racial and class tensions are relatively low, the Na-
tionality Gardens in Rockefeller Park a symbol of the way
Polish, German, Czech, Italian, Jewish, Hungarian, Rus-
sian, English, Serbian, and Greek vegetables can grow
together in harmony. As long as business continues good,
the antagonism among groups which is one of America's
sadnesses everywhere can probably be confined to the level
of personal bitterness. There may be ill feeling over the
movement of neighborhoods, but no race riots for this year
or next. The current controversy over slum clearance, which
involves resettlement of a large area, will probably be
resolved by bureaucratic rather than Klan methods. Thus
far, the local officials, the Negro population, and the city
as a whole have held firm against a few hysterics made at
the inevitable. A fine residential community of prosperous
Negroes has developed among the mansions near Western
Reserve University. As to others of the oppressed prole-

CLEVELAND: INFLATION-ON-THE-ERIE 159

tariat, a typical real-estate item in one of the newspapers
tells of the sale to a machinist of a "ranch-type" in Shaker
Heights. Price: "About $45,000."

The city has expanded beyond the dreams of John D.
Rockefeller, whose home on Euclid Avenue was razed to
make room for a parking lot, and even now approaches the
fantasies of the Van Swefingen brothers, those heroes of
our mythology who lived together in one room of their
castle near Cleveland and provide perhaps the most
dramatic of the local success stories. (They died owing
between ten and twenty million dollars.) The rapid spread
of the city has created transportation difficulties, housing
difficulties, and political difficulties, with slow money to
be made in solving these problems and fast money to be
made in compounding them. Clevelanders have not proved
reluctant to accept either variety of cash. The fifty-two-
floor Terminal Tower, built by the authority of Van
Sweringen paper, looks out with commercial pride over
the movements of money in a land once wasted by Indians,
its flag far up aflutter to indicate a ball game today and its
spire imperceptibly in motion against the forces of wind
and gravity.

Culture is not neglected amid such prosperity. Cleve-
land's little-theater groups, symphony orchestra, chamber-
music societies, art museum, zoo, and sandlot baseball
leagues are known throughout our commuting world, from
Painesville on the east to Lorain on the west, and in justice
it must be added even beyond. Ballet, opera, and stag
movies all have their enthusiasts. The Health Museum,
first in America, houses "Juno, the Transparent Lady/'
whose inner organs light up when a button is pressed.
Particularly among the "nationality" groups, traditional
crafts enjoy a continued practice ceramics, stained-glass
windows, organ-building, weaving, and so on. Cleveland's
sense of being a patron of the arts is fortified by such
local events as the annual visits of the New York Metro-

. 160 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

politan Opera, the Ballet Russe, and Bennett Cerf; Hart
Crane once lived here, and Time was once edited in Cleve-
land by that young man Luce and friends. The Mad Killer
of Kingsbury Run here reverently given his complete
title whose capture has been announced and then re-
tracted to the accompaniment of scandals in the sheriff's
office and accusations of police brutality, is occasionally
resurrected by the newspapers during slow days in the
cold war. (Their most generous theory: that he represents
a latter-day marriage of Malthus and Robin Hood, ridding
the community of undesirables. An estimated score thus
far: twenty-six dismemberments.)

Another burgeoning garden of culture is the local tele-
vision industry. It hopes to contribute to the national glory
of Cleveland by eventually housing network shows. West-
ern Reserve University has pioneered in teaching logic,
psychology, and literature to thousands of television view-
ers, morning meditations on Pavlov's dog being brought
to Mrs. Northeastern Ohio by a sixteen-inch-high homun-
culus in a Muntz or General Electric tube. These are
credit courses. Cleveland College, the downtown branch
of Western Reserve, has developed an extensive program
of evening adult classes, offering capsule courses in every-
thing from Hats & Bonnets to Mann & Gide, with the
clatter of sewing machines sometimes interrupting the dis-
cussion which attempts to measure in pounds and ounces
just fcow much madness is proper to the most efficient
functioning of an artist. We have enough local "creative
people/' painters, musicians, sculptors, writers, and disc
jockeys, to satisfy the need of the women's clubs for free
luncheon speakers. One novelist claims to have been intro-
duced to an important lady as "a big man in the Insight
business."

But perhaps the most ambitious of the dreams in our
community is the city planner reported to be devoting
himself to a modern reconstruction of "the Best Location

CLEVELAND: INFLATION-ON-THE-ERIE - 161

in the Nation" after its helter-skelter growth will have been
corrected by an atom bomb. As a more immediate concern,
the planners are attempting to reform the lakefront and
the Cuyahoga River, that freckled, odorous, precociously
senile stream which led W. K Kelsey, the great journalistic
advantage which Detroit holds over Cleveland, to wonder
if perhaps the Cuyahoga does not "begin somewhere as
a limpid brooklet wandering between lush banks overhung
with asphodel and floating with those nenuphars that the
French poets love so well, and if along the line it loses
its virginity, so that by the time it reaches Cleveland, it's
just an old trot." The industries and the suburbs which
use her, however, love her for what she is, a receptacle so
unprepossessing that even the suicides of Cleveland are
driven to the drugstore, the locked garage, or other waters.

Of the seven institutions of higher learning located
in or near Cleveland, the chief is Western Reserve Uni-
versity, which sponsored a musical comedy two summers
ago in order to celebrate a hundred years of progress. Known
as "The Yale of the Middle West" this slogan is applied
chiefly during the continuous campaign for endowment
it can perhaps most fairly be stated of Western Reserve
that Yale must bow to it in the financing of musical
comedies. In return, Cleveland's great university should
be gracious enough to concede the palm to Yale in the area
of intellectual vivacity. Several of the graduate schools,
those of medicine and others, deserve their respectable
national reputations.

Case Institute, Western Reserve's most steadfast rival
in football and fund-raising, has celebrated the victories
of abstraction and officially recognized theoretical physics
by changing its name from ** of Applied Science" to the
luxurious " of Technology." Dancing academies, charm
schools, Diesel institutes, and evanescent colleges offering
degrees in Your Memory, How to Build It, or Success the

. 162 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

Himalayan Way all find a clientele hot for inward bet-
terment.

The revival meeting is cultivated with a success which
depends on the preacher's satisfying the critical standards
of Cleveland's sophistication in theology. At Lenten time
last year, a newspaper printed a series of personal credos,
fine publicity for God, by prominent leaders of business,
finance, the professions, government, and the long con;
the tone was one of easy social familiarity they know
whose side He is on and they developed an image of the
Almighty as the benevolent cartelist, hedging against in-
flation but content with nonvoting share in numerous
healthy American enterprises. Some splendid local ex-
amples attest to the earthly reward of piety.

In an effort to relieve us of some of the money with
which the pockets of Cleveland are heavy, the banks
swollen, and the mattresses lumpy, a number of industries
have undergone rapid expansion during tie past ten years.
(At income-tax time in town each winter, premium prices
are paid for high-grade woolen socks of the sort with
reinforced toe and heel in which a roll of fifties can
safely be tucked, protected by mothball and prayer from
the assaults of time, beast, conscience, or federal treasury
agent. A light sleeper is kept awake during the March
nights by the steady chuck-chuck of his neighbors' spades
in their back yards.) Clevelanders have tried sex and drink
and found that, although activities to be recommended in
their places, they do not spend money fast enough. They
have tried speculation in real estate and discovered, to their
dismay, that no matter how risky the speculation, they
have almost invariably suffered a profit during the past
fifteen years. The distraught philanthropist who tried scat-
tering bills of medium denomination from his office window
was arrested by alert policemen and released to the custody
of his heirs. Therefore, in response to great civic need, the
existing brokerage firms have expanded their staffs, opened

CLEVELAND: INFIATION-ON-THE-ERIE 163

new offices, and invited aid from New York to accom-
modate the waiting hordes of stock-buyers who seek to
regain the unencumbered agility of the fine careless days
of 1932.

A more general attempt to spend money is represented
by a proliferation of night clubs which astonishes lifetime
residents, who remember Cleveland's caf6 society as a
choice between a Saturday night with goulash and wine
or the band concerts at the shell in Edgewater Park, the
lovers' sticky hands united in a box of crackerjack. The first
settlers of the city converted their grain into liquid form
for greater profit in the journey eastward. Their insight and
ingenuity was reflected during the era of the Volstead
Amendment by many contemporary settlers, now gone
legit, mellowed by age and gain. Instead of bucking motor
launches across Lake Erie to Canada, some of them have
now flowered into a homely maturity and useful contribu-
tion to community recreation through their association
with the entertainment business, importing everything from
trapeze acts to ''risky songs direct from New York and
Miami Beach."

Not long ago, a small west-side bar, far from down-
town, hired Rudy Vallee for a week of the "Whiffenpoof
Song" and nostalgia about old Yale for the pleasure of the
neighborhood loungers. "Big names" visit supper clubs
which used to be satisfied with high-school bands. The kids
who once made out with a soda and a few nickels for the
juke box are now in the habit of parking their convertibles
at Moe's Main Street and investing respectable sums in
an evening with Johnny Ray ("Mr. Emotion in Person
NOW"), as he puts his head against the piano, sobs briefly,
and sings, "Tell the Lady I Said Good-bye." Cleveland
bobby-soxers, acting under orders from the local deejays,
mouths agape, deeply moved, marched among the first in
Johnny Ray's crusade to carry his message to the Paramount
in faraway and infidel New York. At any rate, with tin

164 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

whistles passe and crackerjack prizes made of paper, the
band concert has fallen into obsolesence.

The gentleness and moderation typical of Cleveland
can be illustrated by a recent incident. The manager of one
of the night spots, a distinguished bootlegger, racketeer,
and gambler, was having a heart-to-heart talk with his
parking-lot attendant In the course of their negotiations,
which were chiefly devoted to reprimands for joy-riding in
the automobiles of customers, he expressed himself with
an eloquence which knocked several teeth through the em-
ployee's cheek. The latter, perhaps encouraged by job
mobility in a time of intense business activity, retorted by
stabbing his ex-boss, who by this time had accepted his
resignation. Interviewed at the police station, the parking-
lot attendant, now out of work but not embittered, issued
the following statement: "I used my little knife because
I didn't want to cut him bad."

One of the scenic paths recommended to the tourist
follows along the Cuyahoga River in the industrial flats.
By day this area is covered with an acrid pall. By night the
sky is violet, throbbing and flaring with the reflection from
the blast furnaces. In this oldest corner of the city, from
which the nutritive rattlesnake has long since fled, some
of Cleveland's few poor people cower in shame for their
lack of initiative and patriotism toward "The Forest City,"
'The Convention City/' "Where Coal and Ore Meet/'
Nearby streets, named by the first settlers, may startle the
visitor who finds rusty plaques identifying them as Literary
Road or College Avenue or Professor Street or Shakespeare
Avenue. Farther along, at the shoreline of Lake Erie, he
can look east to the municipal rubbish dump, which
smolders constantly, and admire the tranquil hobbyists
who stand studying it and competing to club the rats which
occasionally emerge.

On Sunday, however, the stroller will discover in this

CLEVELAND: INFLATION-ON-THE-ERIE - 165

area a calm tribute to America's industrial might. Over-
head, the traffic sings across a great bridge, and at his feet,
in the shadows of the bridge, a maze of streets, paths, and
alleys leads to docks, warehouses, and small machine shops.
The stain of smoke fades briefly from the urban clouds.

If he makes his way to the bank of the Cuyahoga,
which has kept its Indian name, he can find wild sunflowers
which come six feet out of the muck in September. He
may even, as did one ftdneur, chance upon a lovely young
artist rapidly sketching the city's skyline, her mouth in a
pout, her golden hair shining in the autumn sun, her eyes
awash with the contemplation of beauty.

To the sightseer this unexpected vision in a beige
cashmere sweater came as a wondrous example of an area
of experience still open to private enterprise. He made his
way through the brush to surprise her, coming around a
heap of tin cans and decaying tires with an inquiry which
united a theme of respectful gallantry to the grace of
esthetic sensibility: "Excuse me, Miss, are you from the
Cleveland Institute of Art? The Museum classes, maybe?"

She was reluctant to discuss her work. In fact, she fled
with wild shrieks, having been convinced by the newspapers
that he must have intended assault, purse-snatching, or at
least what is called "exposing his person."

He was left with her sketch of the Terminal Tower.
She seemed to have talent. Like the spirit of Cleveland,
her talent might develop with greater richness if she were
more confident of her power, less speedy in the flight with
money, and yet more adventurous in the exposing of her
person to the risks of love.

1951

Haiti: Americans in the Port of Princes

The little fellow does -what he can;

the big fellow does -what he -wants.

Haitian proverb

you CAN ENTER BY TWO ROUTES. By ship you look away
from the luxury of a Caribbean cruise to the city spread
out in a yellow-gray haze along the wide, wide bay a low
jumble of buildings and the guttering poverty of La Saline
and the lovely blue mountains rising through the town.
The first Haitians you meet are elite doctors and port
officials, sweating primly and stubbornly in clothes made
for another climate, and the naked boys diving for coins
from their burned-out log canoes.

Or you may step from an air-conditioned airplane onto
a road where the donkeys and peasant women are carrying
their loads of vegetables or coffee into the market, and
there you hear the insinuating greeting the mass of Haitians
offer the tourist: "Geev-me-fiave-cents-Meester." If you
hold your hand out right back at her, she may laugh and
join you in the joke. Her mood changing, she prefers
the conspiracy of shared laughter to an easy nickel. Beg-
gars here are rarely insistent

166-

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 167

Haiti is surely one of the queerest places on earth. The
American has little to sustain him at first except a taste
for exotism. The traditional joys of tourism swimming,
sunning, running, wenching, and writing letters home
are required because they at least make contact with a
familiar world.

Otherwise it is exile in a Garden of Eden fallen into
permanent depression. The Republic of Haiti, a small island
state in the Caribbean Sea, is tropical, mountainous, sea-
bordered except for the frontier shared with the Dominican
Republic, and so densely populated that the traveler finds
it difficut to relieve himself by the side of the road without
a crowd of peasants materializing out of the brush to ob-
serve and applaud him. Born of a slave revolt unique in
history, the chief characteristic of Haiti's career has been
a nervous alternation between occasional reformers and
ephemeral tyrants who have used the state as the means
to personal fortune. While Haiti has succeeded in pro-
ducing a number of extraordinary men, it has never suc-
ceeded in developing a stable government serious about
educating the illiterate masses and consistent in attempt-
ing to raise the standard of living of a people that is one
of the poorest and most long-suffering in the world.

In principle, Haiti is a Negro nation, French in lan-
guage, Catholic in religion, democratic in government In
practice, Haiti is a collection of almost four million Negroes
ruled by a largely mulatto upper class; its business is con-
trolled by this so-called elite and by foreigners; the people
speak Creole and except for about eight per cent of the
population do not understand, read, or write French;
Catholicism has an ambiguous position among a people
profoundly rooted in the celebrations of the voudou
pantheon; the government, under elegantly written laws
and a model constitution, is democratic in form and a mili-
tary dictatorship in fact.

Some of the first leaders of the Haitian slaves against
their French masters fought earlier at Savannah in the

168 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

American Revolution. The chief motive for rebellion in
Haiti was the misery of the slaves. However, the genius
of Toussaint and of the other slave leaders in Port-au-
Prince was kindled by the same ideas of the Rights of Man
that illumined the disorders in Paris and Boston in that
epoch.

Despite a common parenthood of ideas this can be
seen in the declarations of independence for the United
States and Haiti official American policy, often instigated
by slave-holders, remained for a long time deeply hostile
to the new black nation which had won its liberty by its
own efforts against a Napoleon at the height of his power.
Thomas Jefferson even expressed the fear that the Haitians
might invade the United States in order to free the slaves.
Throughout the first hundred years of Haitian independ-
ence, the United States stayed mainly aloof from the
affairs of Haiti, which was treated as an untouchable
among the nations, except to warn away any Europeans
who seemed to be looking for naval bases in the Caribbean
Sea. The chief part of Haiti's commerce and international
intercourse was carried on with France, with which the
Haitian ruling class preserved sentimental ties despite the
bitterness of slavery and the bloodbaths of the war for
freedom. The sons of rich Haitians, perhaps bearing the
blood of both Norman nobility and Guinean princes in
their veins, went to school at the Lyce Stanislas and the
Sorbonne in Paris.

Then, in 1915, the integration of Haiti into American
hemispheric affairs began with the military occupation of
Haiti by American Marines. The public explanation for
the Occupation involved the revolutionary disorders in
Port-au-Prince. The Haitian President, Vilbrun Guillaume
Sam, following a massacre of his political opponents in
prison, had just been torn to bits by a mob in the street;
presidents before him had come and gone like the wind,
poisoned, blown up in their palaces, and regularly removed

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 169

from office by irregular means. The more compelling
reason for the American Navy's steaming into the harbor
concerned a debt which the National City Bank of New
York wanted to make sure would be collected and which
was, in fact, paid out of the customs receipts.

A just appraisal of the Occupation, which continued
until implementation of the Hull-Roosevelt "Good Neigh-
bor" policy, is not easy to make. Progress, profitable both
to Haitians and Americans, was achieved in several areas,
including public health, road-building, fiscal organization,
etc. At the same time, the fierce individualism of the
Haitian spirit was affronted by the ineptitudes (and some-
times worse) of an occupying force which, at least at first,
chose Southern Marines for duty in Haiti because "they
know how to deal with darkies/' The sophisticated Paris-
educated elite, accustomed to being the master in its own
house, suffered emotional slights; the peasantry suffered
from the forced labor gangs organized by the Americans
to build roads this seemed close to the dreaded slavery
which Haitians have never forgotten. Military force is a
poor teacher of the democratic process. The Occupation
closed gracefully, however, and the general Haitian feeling
toward the American colossus was not an unfriendly one.

Now, after years of sporadic sentimental efforts to
relate the Haitian to the French economy, Haiti is per-
manently fixed as an economic pendant to the United
States. Its coffee, for example, the chief money crop, is
finally finding its natural market. Some light on the new
role of Americans in world affairs may be generated by
rubbing against some of the questions that occur to an
American resident in Port-au-Prince:

How comfortable is Haiti in this necessary joining of
its own national destiny with a culture which is so pro-
foundly different from its own?

Where is the place in Haitian life of the Americans
residing in Haiti?

170 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

What is it like to be an American in this "tropical
paradise" which is one of the poorest, most overpopulated,
most underdeveloped, most primitive nations in the world?

Every creature in the sea eats people; it is
the shark which bears the bad name.

Haitian proverb

The shadow of the United States over Haiti is a long
one. It is a protective mantle for the American visitor; he
feels it the first time he makes a traffic error and is whistled
down by a cop who then, seeing that he is American,
waves him on if his victim can walk away. The Haitian
government charged the United Nations $150 for a baby
run over and killed by a careless chauffeur. This seemed a
fortune to the bereaved parents, but to most Americans
would seem to be really a rather inexpensive baby. The
famous and immensely moving Haitian hospitality almost
any peasant will offer coffee to a stranger, and if he needs a
place for the night, the peasant will put his family outdoors
and give the traveler his hut is especially tender toward
Americans. The desire to please can be embarrassing. If
asked for a direction, the average poor Haitian will always
answer, even if he does not know the answer. This may
cause the traveler some confusion, but at least it attests
to an eagerness to make the American happy. Most
Haitians will never say no to an American. If an American
asks a question involving a yes or no answer, he should
be prepared to figure out from the way the Haitian says
yes whether he means yes or no.

On another social level, invitations to the exclusive
clubs are readily available to the visitor, while nouveaux
riches Haitians, who may have every personal merit imagin-
able, are kept waiting until their children make a brilliant
marriage into a "right" family or otherwise prove them-
selves with the elite. It is relatively easy for an American

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 171

to be promoted to the highest society, there to play tennis
or canasta with names that date back to Dessalines' gen-
erals; a Haitian whose wealth is new, whose skin is dark,
and whose family is unknown may still be voted down by
the admission committee of the Cercle Bellevue. (The
question of skin color is a complicated one which it is
not my purpose to discuss here. Some upper-class Haitians
have dark skins; some lower-class Haitians have light skins;
but nevertheless the chief criteria of class distinction are
color of skin, slope of nose, twist of hair, and other tests
of Caucasian blood, despite the fact that everyone is proud
of his slave ancestors who won freedom from the French.)

Another sign to the visitor of the special status of the
United States is the profound impregnation of the Creole
and French languages of Haiti with Americanisms that set
on edge the teeth of visiting Frenchmen. The policeman
yells, "Faites back!" (pronounced "bock") when he means
"En arriere." The verb for spraying a room with insecticide
is "flitter," derived from a popular product of Standard
Oil. The grammar of Creole, modeled on various African
languages, is more like that of English than like French,
although most of its vocabulary comes from French. High-
status words and phrases, such as "Dry Cleaning" and
"Air Conditioning," are often spoken and written in Eng-
lish rather than in their French equivalents.

The Port-au-Prince radio broadcasts singing com-
mercials for American toothpastes and breakfast cereals in
Creole; offices, parties, dances, and dinners require clothes
which are a real burden in the tropics but which give the
sufferer the badge of French or American culture that
separates him so visibly from the peasant or laborer; to
drink visky instead of the excellent native rum is the pin-
nacle of chic; a common reading of Time or a common
appreciation of Bing Crosby offers an occasion for com-
munion with the forces of great power. This respect for
American achievement is genuine and extends to all

* 172 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

domains. One of the great primitive painters of Haiti, a
man of enormous individuality and self-respect, has dec-
orated his house with his own drawings, with paintings
and sculpture by his friends, with relics of Catholic and
voudou religious art, with flowers and plants from his
neighborhood and, in the place of honor on the wall, a
full-page photograph of Harold Stassen. He had clipped
it from Life. The fact that he doesn't know who Harold
Stassen is makes the tribute still more touching.

Despite the evidence of favor, the deep ambivalence
of attitude toward Americans expresses itself in many
domains. An American has little chance against a Haitian
in a court of law. The American who seeks to start a busi-
ness in Haiti without Haitian partners will suffer such
strange misfortunes as to make him wish he had stood in
Delaware. An American who makes any slight error, such
as slipping in the street, will find a crowd enormously
entertained by his bad luck. They will help him up and dust
him off if necessary, but their pleasure in the fall from
dignity of the blanc is unmistakable. Incidentally, the word
blanc has come to mean simply "foreigner/' so that even
an American Negro has been referred to as a blanc.

The world-wide stereotype of the American as a crude
but efficient engineer is echoed in Haiti, where an educator
wfll say that Haiti must import its automobiles and tractors
from the States but its textbooks and "culture" from
France. Only a younger generation of thoughtful Haitians
has begun to point out that realities must be faced in a
society that still allows students to spend their evenings
outdoors memorizing Racine under streetiamps because
they do not yet have electricity in their houses. For many
years French law, art, and manners were painted over the
realities of Haitian life: America is the turpentine which
is dissolving this pleasant surface. (Some upper-class
Haitians have asked the police to chase away the students
working under streetlamps. They say that it makes a bad

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 173

impression on the tourists.) Many Haitians can compare
the styles of Bossuet and Racine; not enough can set up
an electrical circuit In part, at least, this emphasis on
classical intellectual training, along with a persistent dis-
dain of technical skills, is an inheritance from the master-
slave society of the colonial epoch. "You Americans tell
us to work," the Haitian seems to be declaring, "but we
are masters now." And the master is a cultured gentleman
for whom others do the work. "Sweating is a sign of igno-
rance," the Haitian says.

As the result, even the servants have servants, and a
houseboy will use his own money to hire a shoeshine boy
to clean his employer's shoes. To be a houseboy is to have
a job of higher status than to be a shoeshine boy. A worker
promoted to foreman of a gang will not deign to show
the men under him how to perform a task which he used
to do every day. The American drive to get the job done
is foreign to the Haitian way. It is a trait of the American
character that is both admired and feared.

Of course, national habit is one matter and individual
personality another. Every American in Port-au-Prince
knows a few angry Haitians who defy climate, custom, and
public pressure in order to arrive at work promptly, become
emotionally involved with their jobs, and take pleasure
in accomplishment. But they have a hard time.

Haitians who are being sent in increasing numbers
to the States to study often find a wall of prejudice against
them when they return. The engineers have to open shops,
the educators work as clerks because they no longer fit into
the "Haitian way." Columbia and Carnegie Tech may
replace the Sorbonne in time, but it is the graduate of the
French schools who wins the respect shown a scholar. One
agronomist who defended his American hosts was admon-
ished with the peasant saying: "The fish trusts the water,
and it is in the water that it is cooked." For many Haitians,
aware of a history of spite and exploitation and a continu-

174 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

ing race prejudice, the years of suspicion are not over.
Charlemagne Peralte, who led a rebellion against the Am-
erican Marines and was crucified against a door, is a popular
hero.

A striking illustration of the overestimation of Amer-
ican power comes in politics, which is the chief concern
of life in Port-au-Prince, even more important than love-
making, except perhaps on Saturday nights. It is generally
assumed that an American resident is an FBI spy, a jour-
nalist ready to imagine calumnies about zombies and black
magic, or an agent sent to do in the current government.
The most trivial remark of an American resident can have
political repercussions as it is transmitted by that most
rapid means of communication, the telejiol or telemouth.
It is automatically assumed that the American Embassy
is a control, for bad or for good, on Haitian affairs. The
opposition to the present one-party government, which of
necessity must be a revolutionary opposition, is emotionally
rooted in the hope of American approval; it therefore
appeals to American democratic processes against the pres-
ent (and traditional) military dictatorship. During the
absence of an American ambassador, no opposition news-
paper was allowed to function. When the Honorable Roy
Tasco Davis was appointed, two newspapers took courage
again, and lo! their presses were not burned and their
editors not beaten or imprisoned. (This situation has been
modified. On January 8, 1954, the police broke up and
carried away the printing press and type of Haiti-Demo-
cratique. A few days later, the editor, the deputy Daniel
Fignole, together with his printers, associates, and friends,
was arrested. Last July the other independent newspaper,
Le Constitutionel, was shut down after the chief of police
threatened its editor with ''bodily harm/')

If you tell a Haitian in opposition to the regime of
General Magloire that the American government is prob-
ably not interested in encouraging any movement that

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 175

upsets the relative stability of Haitian politics, even though
it is a one-party stability, you will probably not be believed.
"What! But what about democracy?" The notion that the
United States Embassy will exert pressure against an
undemocratic government is one that does not die despite
the evidence of contemporary history. In the hopeless
morass of Haitian politics, many otherwise intelligent
people cling to the dream of magical American interven-
tion: those who hope for it and those who fear it both
believe in it.

An example of the exaggerated esteem in which the
American is held can be taken from a personal experience.
As recipient of a fellowship in order to study Haitian
institutions, I was interviewed by a number of journalists
in Port-au-Prince. In one newspaper I was quoted as having
cited Montaigne's remark that "all culture comes from the
people." A-ha! It was immediately "telemouthed" that the
visitor had put himself on the side of "the people" against
"the regime," that he represented official American policy,
and that he was a paid "fomenter." I was warned that
further statements of this sort would result in my being
expelled from Haiti.

A curious sidelight is that, while the citation from
Montaigne is an unexceptional remark with which I can
agree, it was never spoken during the interview. The
journalist, playing on the exacerbated subtlety of the read-
ers of a subsidized press, put the phrase in my mouth for
reasons of his own.

Another American resident, writing in a local news-
paper that fear is an obstacle to human progress, created a
sensation among Haitians who took this to mean that they
should not be afraid of trying to overthrow the government.
The process of logic is impressive: Fear makes us obey. An
American says that fear is bad. Ergo, the secret policy of
the State Department is to help us overthrow the govern-
ment of Haiti.

. 176 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

In a culture which Edith Efron Bogat, an American
journalist resident in Haiti, has described as suspicious
almost to the point of paranoia, the American is now
perched among the heroes of the national fantasy life. He
represents wealth, beauty, power over God's atomic earth,
and the mobility of achievement He may be loved; he
may be feared; he may be loved and feared at the same
time. He is never ignored. As the Haitians say, "All that
you do not know is greater than you."

During my first days in Haiti, I got lost in the maze
of unmarked streets near my house. I stopped and asked
for my street by name. No one knew it. Then I asked
where the new white man in the neighborhood lived, and
I was led home immediately by people who had, appar-
ently, never seen me before.

You cannot sleep on a mat and then
speak evil of it

Haitian proverb

Americans in Haiti are not just individual human beings;
they are even more than ''ambassadors." They are a focus
for envy, aspiration, and the mysteries of power. A Miami
floozy can turn the heads of men married to the most
charming Haitian beauties. A state senator down for a
quick suntan becames a representative of American author-
ity, deserving receptions, dinners, and an exchange of
fountain pens with the President A buyer for the notion
counter of a department store is a gros commergdnt and
the pale literary cowboy who turns out Western stories at
two cents a word is feared and buttered up as a grand
6cnvain de notre amicdL voisin nord-am6ricctin.

How do Americans function in this tender situation?

The thousand or so American residents, mostly located
in the capital, fall into several fairly distinct categories.

First, there are the commercial and diplomatic resi-

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 177

dents who, in general, lead the familiar life of American
officialdom abroad. They are assigned to a job; they do it;
then they go home. Their contact with Haiti is kept to a
minimum. The American country club has recently ad-
mitted its first Haitian members, but the usual social life
of these Americans is one of ping pong and poker, sewing
bees and bazaars, and as little contact with Haitians outside
the work day as possible. Of course, the avoidance of rela-
tionship is a kind of relationship. Haitians suspect race
prejudice as the reason for this isolation, and it surely does
nothing to improve feeling between the two peoples, but
it can be said in defense of these Americans that their
behavior is not exceptional: American businessmen and
diplomats live like this all over the world. Their children
may learn Creole from the servants, but the mysteries of
Haiti voudou, the rich folk culture, the complex meeting
of French and African ways of life, the bitter fret of Haitian
aspiration and Haitian misery are foreign to them. They
solve the problems of living in Haiti by not really living
there.

Then there is a small number of former Marines and
American Navy men who stayed on to settle after the
Occupation. These men, usually marrying on the island
and otherwise "Haitianizing" themselves, are perhaps the
most secure of the foreigners. One, the former medic who
now calls himself "Doctor" Reiser, is a muscular and
energetic grandfather with a career as drummer, painter,
leaf doctor, and voudou initiate; for a time he directed
the local insane asylum; he has exhibited considerable
histrionic skill and attained some financial success in nurs-
ing his legend, a variation on the white-voodoo-doctor
theme. Others, less spactacular than Doc Reiser, have found
their levels in Haitian society and are living out their lives
and rearing their children as the Haitians do.

Another curious group includes the American women
who have married Haitians. Living in a Negro republic

178 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

does not solve the problem of high feeling against inter-
marriage. These women have families, friends, and their
own pasts abroad: they cannot sever all contact. Besides,
Haiti has its own home-grown variety of race prejudice.
What can the American woman say when her husband
forbids their coffee-colored children to play with the black
children next door? Rearing children with a Haitian partner
creates problems which marrying an American Negro does
not involve: in Haiti the American is marrying into a cul-
ture which is deeply alien to American ways. Because of
all the obstacles, most of the American women who marry
Haitians are iconoclastic characters with powerful urges
towards individual assertions of personality. They are also
often the envy of their American friends, as they generally
find husbands with special attributes of capacity, hand-
someness, and fortune. The Haitian upper class which is
interested in whitening its children's skins is an elite of
considerable charm and drive.

A small group of Americans, living in a no-man's-land
between Haitian and American life in Haiti, includes the
bohemians attracted by the sun, sea, glamour, and cheap
rum. They generally do not stay long. The complexities of
life in a culture which is African and French at the same
time, and difficult to penetrate, usually send them back to
the more familiar climes of Mexico or Paris. Haiti is weird
and magical and very primitive; these attributes, while
potential tourist attractions, are not yet ready to be assim-
ilated by the typical American cheap-liver abroad. The
artists of Haiti do not have a tradition of discourse; they
are not great caf6 talkers. An obstacle to the male in search
of passing adventure is the rigid upper-class moral code.
The Creole maidens are lovely, but their fathers are all
crack shots. Gossip is rapid and lethal.

More than in most places in the world, the American
in Haiti is held off from sharing the life of the people. He
is isolated by color, language, religion, habits, and standards,

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 179

and by the economic prodigy which puts almost any Amer-
ican automatically in a lonely eminence at the top of a
feudal structure. Poverty is bad for the rich, too. But sus-
tained good will is rewarded by good friends, and even
power has its compensations. The prestige of America
focuses an exaggerated attention, sometimes hopeful,
sometimes suspicious, on the actions of individual Amer-
icans. The American lives in Haiti as an honored guest, a
too-much-honored guest whose slightest mistake can be
disillusioning to his hosts. It is in many ways a high and
intense way to live.

The problem of the American separated from his own
culture is similar all over the world. Of course, he forgets
about Arthur Godfrey and loses track of Walter Winchell;
he takes his ease from television and the New York
Yankees. Haitian art, literature, music, and dance are
based on rich traditions and can show the interested out-
sider some luminous modern developments. The experi-
ence of living in Haiti, while exotic, is one with the life of
human beings everywhere. The specific emphases of
Haitian ways provide a sharp perspective on American ex-
perience.

However, the long-time American resident also runs
the risk of reducing the possibility of a meaningful involve-
ment in the life of his own society, of moving off, of becom-
ing distant from himself. An air of inefficacy and vague-
ness in the expatriate is familiar to travelers everywhere.

The accusation of authority may make a mediocre man
strive to live up to the expectations that surround him:
dignity is contagious. Or he may take a peculiar pleasure
in selling his clothes and being picked up drunk and naked
in a gutter: responsibility is threatening. Both types of
behavior occur. For Americans, life in tropical Port-au-
Prince seems to produce an accelerated development of
character in the direction of either the sick softness of a
fallen mango or of a firm and sunny self-realization. Haiti

180 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

is difficult for foreigners. Each difficulty presents an option.
These options seem to be put forward more strictly than
elsewhere in the streets, offices, homes, plantations, and
social occasions of Haiti.

Nevertheless, the brilliant contrasts and powerful feel-
ings animating Haitian life suggest the possibility of a
healthful stimulus. It should be easy to keep the emotions
awake and not just at the level of a dilettante in exotism.
The proud individuality of all Haitians is a lesson in human
dignity amid conditions of material misery. While the
average per capita income is estimated at less than thirty-
five dollars a year, the Haitian remains a lively and sympa-
thetic person, despite the occasion for deceit and craft which
must also be assimilated by the stranger. The Haitian's
fears are enormous and his problems intense; his urge to
life is joyful, angry, and energetic. His energy is expressed
more creatively at play and at talk than at work in a society
in which the conventional rewards of work are difficult to
attain. The possibilities of men cooperating in order both
to fulfill some common design and to gain individual bene-
fits await the evolution of a society which can properly
assimilate intelligent labor. Try to build a house in Haiti,
for example. Men who live in mud huts, and who live
without the hope of ever having anything but a mud hut,
cannot be expected to make doors fit and walls perpendic-
ular. Why should they be interested? Children who grow
up without machines or mechanical construction of any
sort in the household will never develop the concept of the
straight line or the right angle.

The stick that beats the black dog
can beat the -white dog too.

Haitian proverb

France and Italy have had a society which rewarded
labor and, at least temporarily, find their world unhappily

HAITI: AMERICANS IN THE PORT OF PRINCES 181

diminished; Haiti has never had this level of civilization.
The situation for the American visitor in all these places is
similar, but with important differences in esteem and ex-
pectation. Being rich in population and resources, relatively
immune to inflation and foreign manipulation, less scarred
by war or internal conflict, and blessed by a continuity of
government, America still offers a personal future to work
done by the individual. This gift has been lost in many
advanced societies; it has not been achieved in Haiti. The
Haitian knows it; the American knows it. Their knowledge
is a continual unspoken communication between them. It
makes for a sort of hope and understanding: and it makes
for a bitterness and unease. The troubles of pride are the
most dangerous ones.

Both stubborn and yielding, tense and sleepy, heavy
with pride and drenched in shame, the paradoxical Haitian
character is a challenge to the American willing to par-
ticipate in Haitian life. The fact of his being overvalued
as an American may give him a special resonance of sense
for others and of responsibility to his own capacity. As long
as he remains in Haiti, he is addressed by martial music:
Be as important as Haitians want and fear you to be! It is
an expectation from others and from himself which may
urge him to return to the possibilities of American life with
a new awareness.

Finally, because of the special sin of American history,
it is instructive for Americans to live in a culture in which
the statesmen and diplomats, the brilliant educators and
the artists, the agronomists and the engineers, and most
of the rich businessmen are colored. The white man is the
stranger, the interloper. He may be an honored guest, but
he is only a tolerated guest all the same. He will see in
action the liberal truism that, despite differences in condi-
tion, all peoples face similar problems with the same re-
sources in character.

1954

Reno: The Great Divide

WOMEN ARE PURPOSEFUL IN RENO. The lovely blonde crit-
ter strolling the lobby of the Hotel Mapes, with a mole on
her cheek accented by make-up as if she were Alice Faye
miraculously preserved into 1961, did not come all the way
to Reno in order to stake out uranium claims. She did not
pack her kit bag to examine the pelicans and fossils of
Pyramid Lake, where, during more idyllic days, Arthur
Miller and Marilyn Monroe quietly strolled and waited for
legal technicalities to be arranged. Nor is she a cultural
anthropologist studying the Paiute Indians or the sheep-
herding Basques who gather at the Santa Fe Hotel in down-
town Reno to eat and drink in French, Spanish, and Basque.
She may sample all these incidental lures, but primarily
she has come to Reno for one of two purposes: either to
gamble (and also to find a man) or to shed a man (and
also to gamble). When she pauses in her slow amble across
the lobby, straightening her stocking she bends and
harkenl we have time to examine her third finger, left
hand.

We find the circle of the abandoned wedding ring,
182

RENO: THE GREAT DIVIDE 183

sunburned a bright red. She is a member of the Six Week
Club. She is a joyous Jill ? with her tanned face hit by a
vision of the good life, her rump constricted by her new
magenta Western pants and poutingly pressing for freedom.
She wears heavy Indian jewelry and the stunned, goofy
look of imminent divorce. She is in the molting phase,
resentful but cute, ready for fun and making with rotating
eyes. There are lots of women. They are waiting and bored,
waiting and anxious, waiting and numerous.

Perhaps she is even one of the ladies who follow the
apocryphal tradition of dropping her wedding band into
the Truckee River near the Washoe County Courthouse,
but more likely, our friend in the lobby of the Mapes has
pawned her slender gold band in order to increase her capital
at the gaming tables. Reno visitors are idealists and prac-
tical; people of action and people who wait. They have
come to Reno after much deep thought, quiet analysis,
and broken crockery. Now they busy themselves with mak-
ing the most of their decision.

Helping them in this task is a permanent cadre com-
posed of several types of specialized workers, including
lawyers, gamblers, and a local brand of cowboy who is not
often home, home on the range. There are other classical
Reno types, including the obedient judges (trained to say
"Granted" without hesitation), landladies, and ranch pro-
prietors (trained to bear witness to the continuous residence
of the plaintiffs in divorce actions), laborers all in the vine-
yard of marital afterthought.

Reno, "The Biggest Little City in the World," has
constituted itself the Great American Divide a man from
his money, a wife from her husband. Lady Luck and Legal
Liberty. There is also sex. In Reno, this is slightly more
complicated than buying a drink in a saloon, but if you
wait about five minutes, and smile, or scowl, or do some-
thing, anything, someone will surely come along.

184 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

A few years ago, they closed the Stockade, Reno's alley
of legalized prostitution, but that was not a very lively
place anyway. It was guarded by a policeman and the girls
behaved as dully as minor bureaucrats. You transacted your
business without shilly-shallying and then skedaddled,
making room for the next in line a little like getting a
haircut or paying a parking ticket. Other towns in Nevada
still exercise local option on the matter of commercial sack-
play, and in Reno many fine citizens fought the passing
of the Stockade. They felt that this was a step away from
the right to free assembly guaranteed by the Constitution.
It also put their innercent dotters in terrible danger from
desert rats and those crazed tourists from San Francisco
and the East. It abolished a reliable money-making and tax-
paying business. But what with a steady influx of divorce-
seekers, plus the legion of cooperative ladies who patrol
the lobbies of the hotels, the passing of the old Stockade
deprived only the most boorishly impatient and the most
stubborn admirers of Nevada frontier tradition.

In all fairness to Reno's hospitality, it must be insisted
that divorce, gambling, drinking and sex do not provide
a complete summary of its services to the visitor. There is
also marriage. Five times as many marriages as divorces are
performed along the banks of the Truckee. Of course, these
marriages have a tendency to return to Reno a few years
later in the form of divorces; but still, the Park Wedding
Chapel, festooned in neon ("Ring Bell for Service at Any
Hour"), is the scene of a rapid marital drone and con-
gratulation. The children of such marriages turn out to be
complex creatures, often with curiously interrelated parents.
("My previous stepfather's brother was the uncle of my
present stepfather's second wife . . .")

"We're not backward," declared one proud Reno
cosmopolite, "we've got our Beat Generation, too, and
it's doing a production of Guys and Dolls.' 9 The cast meets
after rehearsals at The in, spelled with a lower-case (or

RENO: THE GREAT DIVIDE - 185

hungry) "i," where a little group discusses Samuel Beckett
and Sam Cooke; Kafka and Sinatra. Reno is perhaps the
unhippest and zippiest town in all the fifty states. The
women, clicked silly by the keno tabulator, puffy from grief
and alcohol, play femme jatde in the gambling clubs, with
shades jutting out over their sunglasses. This is the promis-
sory land where the oppressed are liberated and the hopeful
stream by on South Virginia Street. The chippies compete
with the divorcettes in all the clubs, casinos, and hotel
lobbies.

Our lady of the Mapes is called a divorcette in Reno.
She is a prospective divorcee. She is still legally bound to a
man hereinafter referred to as Defendant. Defendant has a
job someplace and sends her money. She is a Permanent
Resident, which is not to be confused with an Old In-
habitant. A Permanent Resident is someone in the final
convulsions of marriage who plans to stay for six weeks and
a day, and can prove it with witnesses. (Appropriately
enough, Reno was named after a General Reno, killed in
the Civil War back East, who never once set foot in
Nevacja. The founding fathers were looking for a convenient
short name and drew the General's out of a Stetson. A prac-
tical, unsentimental people.)

Mrs. Permanent Resident may pass her six weeks weep-
ing her eyes out, or she may spend her time in a patio dis-
cussing philosophy with other Permanent Residents.
( "Beneath that rough exterior, girls, beats the heart of a
wife-beater"), or she may hit tiie slots or the tables or the
bars, or she may shyly peek around for a cowboy or a fresh
future Defendant. Itchily she seeks to revenge herself on
the flunkout back home in Chicago or New York. She is
the made-to-order prey for the opportunists, con men, and
brutal rancheros who hang around Reno. She blinks her eyes
into cool desert space as they park the Hertz car off one
of the roads winding into the vacant hills. Sliding across the

186 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

seat, she murmurs, "Oh, Mr. WhatVYour-Name, he was
so mean to me/' Bright desert stars wink above them.

"Call me Slim/' says the wrangler, and takes a firm
hold. A new groom sweeps clean.

The specialized Reno cowboy is a local representative
of one of the most curious professions in contemporary
America. He is known in all the great centers; his grand-
daddy, the gigolo, wore evening attire and a silken mus-
tache; his unacknowledged ancestor was the simpering
Greek Ganymede. Now, in New York and other urban cen-
ters, he may occupy himself with tennis or modeling or
claim to be an actor while he waits to be chosen by some
joy-hunting, moneyed lady. In Reno he manifests himself
as a dude cowboy, based on a ranch, watching the air
terminal, scouting in the better bars and gambling clubs.

Slim is a subtle, part-male creature who probably has
not wrangled a four-legged cow since Reno last housed a
WCTU convention. He is a shill of love, faking high
stakes of passion for a small profit, just as a gambling shill
pretends to gamble in order to make the house look sharp
and busy. A skinny chap in chaps and a duckass haircut,
he keeps busy holding hands with the blue-haired, fifty-
year-old lady in the TV room of the Holiday Motel; the
Trap has gleaming white teeth and the Victim has a sub-
scription to The Wall Street Journd; they will make
beautiful moolah together, he hopes.

Like other professional dude cowhands, Slim dwells
in a series of six-week liaisons, looking always for the Big
Strike the woman who will either take him home in order
to goad Defendant or perhaps will move her bank account
to sunny, tax-free Nevada. When he uses rodeo language,
he is thinking of stock on the wobbly high heel. A "re-
run" is a cow that has been tuckered out by much use,
"generally easier to wrestle and tie." "Snuffy" describes
stock that is wild, ready to go. A "twister" is himself a
cow twister, suffering from scaly elbows and nocturnal pre-
monitions.

RENO: THE GREAT DIVIDE 187 -

In sad fact, he is not a happy wrangler. He sits with
his aging broad, his water-slicked hair growing low down
his neck, his creased, tended tan, his bland, pleased, angry,
hurt, princely, bored clasp of lips; he turns his ankle anxi-
ously in its fancy-worked Western boot. It is costly after
all, making out this way. Hard to give up joy in sex and
work; it's hard to give up being human. "But what is man,"
his neurotic ankle seems to ask, quoting Scripture in its
dismay of soul, "that thou art mindful of him?"

"Nothing doing," answers the silence between his ears,
the creak of his leather.

Cool, professional, a freckled desert hipster, he is tired
and wants to go to bed, but there is no mama to cradle
him, only this rich bitch whose particular mattress needs he
tries to predict as they watch the Jack Paar show together.
Well, maybe he is neither man nor woman, but our bored
buckaroo with his corseted prey is in business, and doing
pretty well.

There are fine hotels in Reno, the Riverside, the
Mapes, and the usual glorious motels with swimming pools
and round-the-clock boozing. There are also the guest
"ranches" (a horse or two) or houses that cater to eco-
nomical divorcettes. "Bonny Bode Inn Divorcees Wel-
come," hints the newspaper advertisement; "Join the Happy
Crowd at Harmony House," another chimes in winsomely;
"Liberty Rooms Free Coffee At Any Hour Make Your
Stay a Memorable One."

The proprietors of these permanent residences for
permanent six-week residents also serve as cheer-mongers to
the sad, introducers for the solitary, and witnesses in court
to swear that the plaintiff was really there for six weeks.
(Efforts to shorten the time of legal residence are met by
the practical objection that Reno needs the money spent
here in ransom after matrimonial jags; conversely, greedy
ideas about lengthening the stay are met by prudent com-

. 188 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

mercial warnings of the threat from sordid, rapid Alabama
and immoral, speedy Mexico.)

Life in these guest houses generally follows a simple,
healthful routine. The marital convalescents share place at
table, space in the laundry room, and stories about the rat,
jackal, hoot owl, dog, porcupine, hyena, or stercoricolous
beetle in Washington, D.C., or San Francisco, Dallas,
Bangor, or wherever. Nevada law in its majesty almost
always agrees that the One Back Home is some sort of
jungle beastie; those in Reno, men and women, are wronged
angels. Many a joyous conversation in a Guest House patio,
concerns ways to settle his/her hash, which badly needs
settling. For current news of what he/she is up to, you
can always get word from detective agencies or crystal ball
snoops who do a thriving business:

PHYCHIC RUTH Card Reader and Counselor 17th
Successful Year in Reno. $3.00. "Phychic" is probably a
combination word, meaning fidgety and fishy, and it char-
acterizes the stories to which poor, long-suffering, three-
dollar Ruth has had to lend an ear. "My husband, listen,
he used to . . ." "That wife of mine, by God, I wanted
to . . ."

Some, of course, have untraceable spouses who, for all
they know, might be working for the Post Office; she lies
dead in a schoolteacher's closet in Tulsa; he is producing
a movie entitled Teenagers at the SEATO Conference;
Phychic Ruth cannot see him clear. He has disappeared
from the ken of mortal and gypsy, and will be symbolically
reached only by that final invocation published in a legal
advertisement:

The State of Nevada sends you greetings! Not having
cohabited with the plaintiff , . .

And hell never know what was said about him before
the Reno judge. The judge probably won't know, either.
He has heard too many stories that all have the same end-

RENO: THE GREAT DIVIDE 189

ing. He turns off the hearing aid and pores over his copy
of Poker a Gentleman's Pastime.

The garrulous camaraderie of the boarding house gives
wounds a chance to heal under the gentle urging of that
famous law misery loves company of the opposite sex.
One should always describe one's trouble to those who
cannot check for accuracy; sympathy begets sympathy in
return; and listen, pal, it sure is good to get away after what
I been through. "I know, I know, and how about making
a tour of the clubs?"

There are plenty of shaky stomachs and trembling
lower lips, plenty of secret tears in narrow beds, but there
is also the lovely resilient chick who comments, "I learned
a great deal from my marriage. I don't regret anything. I
learned how to give big parties and how to keep the maid
from stealing." .

Most things that you do furtively in other places you
can do without shame in Reno. This is to Reno's credit;
honesty is one of the good policies. The popular acceptance
of gambling is indicated by a recent debate in the City
Council. Should the city get out of the slot machine busi-
ness at the Municipal Airport? Of course. Why? Declared
the mayor: "We don't want to compete with private
enterprise."

The private enterprise includes Harold's Club (in
addition to The Nevada, The Golden, Harrah's Club,, and
other secondary institutions), a giant seven-floor depart-
ment store of luck, with blackjack, craps, roulette and eight
hundred slot machines grinding up money twenty-four
hours a day. The customers pull, wait, and stare like the
distraught heroes of horror movies who look at their mon-
ster and say, "I think it's trying to tell us something." (It
is trying to tell them: "The grind is against you, buddy
bell, cherry, and orange/') Some slots are "humanized,"
being built into gorgeous female bodies, with the coins,

190 * THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

when you hit, emerging from a dismally appropriate place.

"We build slot machines/ 7 stated one manufacturer,
"but we don't build machines to force people to play/' Never-
theless, the mechanism seems to be built into most of us.
Jean-Paul Sartre once committed a famous remark: "Hell
is other people." This is an easy epigram, since any defini-
tion of hell with such an outrageous and dogmatic format
will take us by surprise and sound briefly, pretentiously
true. For example: Hell is oneself; Hell is nobody. But
those hip-to-hip rows of cattle before the slot machines,
blind to anything but the rolling fruit, suggest some par-
ticular dramatic sense to the French philosopher's remark.
Hell is other people playing slot machines.

This repetitive, ritualistic, manual game recalls fan-
tasies in which the child defies logic he is all-powerful;
he controls his fate simply by force of will. (Dylan Thomas
made fun of this primitive dream when he wrote about a
rocky transatlantic flight, "Only my iron will will keep the
great bird aloft") The gambler's iron will commands a
jackpot when he wants it right now and refuses to admit
failure until he wakes from his dreams of omnipotence to
find his pockets empty. Perhaps while we are walking on
these psychological waters there is another factor at
work: in his heart of hearts the gambler wants to lose, a
stubborn guilty child asking to be punished for trying to
stand outside the laws of chance.

One of the saddest, most instructive sights in the
world is that of a gambling creep shuffling out of a room
on South Virginia Street and over to the Western Union
office on Center Street, there to mouth his stub of pencil
and try to transform himself into a poet with a new way
of saying SEND MONEY QUICK. Going from club to club you
see the System Players, clutching their notebooks, grinning
hard, with harassed eyes and chewed lips, sure that next
time the laws of statistics, which they have invented, will
take hold. Next time.

RENO: THE GREAT DIVIDE 191

The Smith family, owners of Harold's Club, are re-
spected leaders of community life in Reno. They endow
concerts and the Harold's Club Scholarships at the Uni-
versity of Nevada. (One condition: The Scholar must not
cross the threshold of Harold's Club during his college
enrollment.) Legalized gambling is an important industry.
The high desert skies are clear of industrial smoke; the
fume and fuss of gambling leave little mark on the Nevada
landscape.

Reno and environs display a distinct physical charm
and diversity of terrain. Besides the gambling/divorcing
Reno, there is also the typical Western town in which
people live much as they do in a thousand similar places,
blessed by lovely homes and mortgages, spacious lawns and
chickweed, happy youngsters thronging to school, church,
and dragstrip. This ignored Reno boasts magnificent sur-
rounding mountains, the snow-fed Truckee making green
the center of the city, skiing in winter and healthful dry
desert air in summer plus the University of Nevada,
"finest institution of higher learning in the state." (It is
also the only institution of higher learning in the state.)

But it is not for these advantages in culture and
climate that Reno is so much better known than, say,
Ottumwa, Iowa, or Bellingham, Washington, both towns
of comparable size. Reno is a rambunctious, brawling
Mickey Rooney among cities. The workaday Reno grudg-
ingly harbors its wild, permissive twin, without which, of
course, any renowned Reno at all would be impossible.
The two Renos are joined by common elements of the
picturesque and the bizarre: the traditional rodeo, the
splendors of desert sage and mountain pine, the romantic
outcroppings of silver-bearing rock in nearby, antique Vir-
ginia City, where ragtime is the rule, the hot mineral
springs for swimming, the general morality of No Speed
Limit in Nevada.

192 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

The true churchly, cultural Reno, of which some old
residents defensively prattle, also has some basis in fact,
once you leave Virginia Street (the major casinos), Com-
mercial Row (pawn shops, Indian bars, prodding police-
men), and Lake Street (Chinese and Negro gambling
clubs Reno is covertly Jim Crow). But it's hard to keep
the wistful visitor in church once he has found the Mint
Club, where Rosemarie has been Held Over by Popular
Demand and by popular demand she holds it over the
drinkers at the bar on which she prances. The place of the
great rose window of the cathedral of Notre Dame is taken
by the grandiose outdoor mural of an Indian massacre
which is the entrance to Harold's Club, the dominating
structure in town.

Over this cathedral of chance shines a beacon; within
it the multitude throngs. The slot machines whir, the
process servers knock, the courts do their work. A woman
sniffles, a woman laughs, a dude moves in. Someone asks
for change of a paper twenty in silver dollars. A spur
jangles. Six weeks begin for someone; six weeks are over
for another.

1959

Greenwich Village:
The Changing Village

ON A DUSTY TABLE in the back room of a Greenwich Village
antique shop lies an etching that pictures a mighty stand
of oak being cleared to make way for the construction of
a cabin. A few disconsolate figures, their heads bowed,
mourn the vile encroachment of the metropolis. The title
of the etching is The End of Greenwich Village and the
date on it is 1859.

Greenwich Village ended, then, more than a hundred
years ago. The crooked lanes of "Grenege," the Green
Village, where small landholders grew tobacco aqd whence
large landholders fled to avoid creditors, were beJng joined
to the busy geometrical grid of Manhattan. "This pleasant
and salubrious corner/' this ancient Dutch settlement of
Greenwijk which had appeared on maps as early as 1645,
was dying.

It has been "dying" ever since, regularly. Each gener-
ation, the Village has had its Cassandras to cry its coming
doom, and the present generation is no exception. The
truth, of course, is that Greenwich Village is no longer

- 193 -

194 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

as it was and never has been. A living organism, not a fossil,
its restless change is the constant proof of its vitality.
Today the Village remains an essential element not merely
of the New York scene but of America's long love affair
with the twin mistresses Freedom and Rebellion.

The importance of the Village as actual place and
symbol of change and experiment in America is demon-
strated by the pathetic letter sent off by a Village wife,
Mrs. Melville, to her mother: "Herman has taken to
writing poetry. You need not tell anyone, for you know how
such things get around."

The rumor did get around, alas for Herman, whose
spouse passionately desired that he spend his time gainfully
writing serial stories about whaling; Mrs. Melville bowed
her head with oh! the shame of it, that her beloved Herman
lay on his couch all morning, deceiving her with a muse;
eventually Herman hired himself out as a salaried em-
ployee. But there has always been this small throbbing
ventricle in the busy heart of New York where the poet
might know honor and where the real shame for a wife
would come if Herman stopped writing poetry. For all
these years now, the inventors, composers, painters, poets,
playwrights, and the various would-be and might-be
geniuses have eventually floated upstream until they came
to rest, at least briefly, in Greenwich Village, U.S.A.

They have sometimes been as respectable as Henry
James, who later turned into a wooden-nosed Englishman,
and sometimes as disreputable as Joe Gould, the shaggy
Harvard-graduate hobo, author of the endless and unpub-
lished Ord History of the World, a grinning gnome who
lived on free cafeteria ketchup and national publicity, both
of which are packed with vitamins and minerals. The
geniuses have found inspiration in a certain lounging ease
of life among an all-American stew of Italians, Irish,
Chinese, and Jews who lived in and around the Village
simply because it was their neighborhood. As dogs have

GREENWICH VILLAGE 195

fleas, so the geniuses also found comfort in the hectoring
company of the gaffers, cadgers, sexual experimenters, poli-
tical evangels, and the doddering remnants of elegance near
Washington Square and Fifth Avenue.

At its earliest beginnings, the Village was a trading
post where Canarsie Indians bargained over hides with the
Dutch settlers; there were springs of fresh water on Spring
Street, and Minetta Brook wound along Minetta Lane, and
wolves, panthers, moose, wild turkeys, and heath hens
inaugurated a tradition of good hunting which is carried on
now only by the Continental-clad wolves who prowl the
still-crooked streets of Minetta and Spring and the rest
of the drained, lit^ built-up and leveled-down Village of
today. In those antique times, besides the Dutch and
Indians, there came some English, some French Walloons,
some Jews (a tiny pre-Revolutionary Portuguese Hebrew
cemetery still slices into the barrage of real estate on
Eleventh Street near Sixth Avenue); a number of Negro
freedmen and escaped slaves took their best hold on liberty
in the Village, and according to some authorities, a few
Spanish pirates dropped their eye patches into the bound-
ing main and retired to Perry Street. (Do they now model
Hathaway Shirts? And is there really any buried treasure?
Might be, beneath the pipes and cables and sewers and
foundations upon foundations.)

All this began when the Green Village was a tidy little
settlement insulated from the Manhattan colony, thanks
to swamp, salt marsh, forest, and cripple bush. Gradually
the wild berries and nuts disappeared (later to reappear
in health stores on Eighth Street, along with queen bee
jelly and wheat germ); the English installed tobacco
plantations; Sir Peter Warren owned almost the whole
caboodle. He died in 1752, "removed by the Almighty from
a place of Honour to an eternity of Happiness/' and his
various heirs began the continuous process of bickering
and speculating, dividing and subdividing. On rainy nights

196 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

bearded duffers wanned their backsides by the fire and
grieved over the good old days of the Village.

Soon the skirmishes of 1776 came close; Aaron Burr
galloped through the meadow where the Fifth Avenue bus
turns around; history advanced. But advance as history
must, New York City could never quite digest this winding
knot of exception on its favorite island; Manhattan swal-
lowed it down, it swallowed it up, but Greenwich Village
would not be dissolved, straightened, tamed, numbed, or
numbered. And when it allowed itself partly to be num-
bered, it produced such examples of arithmetical chaos as
an intersection of Fourth and Tenth Streets a tribute
to the old times of Indian trails, when "parallel" and
"perpendicular" meant as little as "pension" and "job
security" to the true Villager of today. The surveyors who
laid out the map of Greenwich Village had irrigated their
wits with birchbark wine.

That allegedly parallel streets should meet and cross
perhaps helps to explain why Washington Irving, James
Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe came to the Village
in the early and middle nineteenth century; West Tenth
Street and West Fourth Street persisted in meeting and
crossing, an assignation which must be a love match since
it is the despair of logical minds, and so Ada Clare (author
of "the most beautiful poems in the language," according
to the New York Atlas) , also came to smoke ( ! ) , drink ( ! ) ,
and talk impertinently with men neither her father,
brother, nor husband ( ! ) . Artistic types like dear Ada, who
somehow had a child without being married (due to too
much smoking, drinking, and conversation), and Henry
Clapp, who found in Greenwich Village the gabled houses
and the charm of Paris, began to gather the noise of
nineteenth-century art about their organizing spirits. Walt
Whitman toured the streets with crumbs for the birds on
his shoulders ("All the critters come to me," he said);
Mark Twain, rescued from bankruptcy by a lecture tour,

GREENWICH VILLAGE 197

lived at 14 West Tenth Street and then, perhaps trying
to escape that maddening intersection with Fourth Street,
moved to 21 Fifth Avenue. Here he took the courage to
write blasphemous books which were published only after
his death.

There were the famous from all over the world, like
John Masefield, or later, like Maxim Gorki, who had a
secretary with whom he was not allowed to register in his
hotel because he admitted freely that they took dictation
together. There were also the generous, like Luke O'Con-
nor, in whose tavern almost anyone could cash a check.
Luke's place came to be known as "The Working Girl's
Home" because a girl could enjoy a quiet glass under
the amiable protection of Luke without being disturbed by
the police. When Luke's place closed, the old times were
over once again.

Now, of course, time really is moving fast; the 1960
"End of Greenwich Village" tramples down that Green-
wich Village which subverts the Greenwich Village which
preceded it; and again change destroys its "essential char-
acter." New high-rise apartment houses, replacing the
handsomely decrepit fretwork tenements, give sign of the
alteration in olde New York wrought by cold cash and hot
mortgage. The restless spirit of consumership has discov-
ered the charm of nonconformity, along with coffee houses,
hi-fi, and girls in tight pants; but the new, prosperous, in-
telligent, gifted wageslaves who seek to recapture their
perhaps never-was youth by moving to the Village want
to nonconform in comfort, like everyone else, with built-in
air conditioners, speedy silent elevators, and a rent they
are not ashamed to murmur aloud.

In the process, some of the traditional Village land-
marks the old Brevoort Hotel, the gingerbread apartment
houses, and the Waldorf Cafeteria, where Maxwell Boden-
heim came to make fun of the junkies, and stayed and
stayed have disappeared. Many fine blocks full of wood-

198 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

burning fireplaces have fallen under the builder's heartless
ax, making way for central heating, low ceilings, and high
rent. The Village is very much a state of mind, usually
centered at such landmarks as Washington Square, Sheri-
dan Square, and a shifting few favorite restaurants, streets,
places, and events; unofficially there can hardly be an
official map for a tradition the outlines of the Village
begin to manifest themselves at Fourteenth Street on the
north, the Hudson River on the west, Canal Street to the
south, and Broadway on the east. But these are not firm
outlines, merely hints and histories. Since there are Vil-
lagers living on Fifteenth Street, is this not the Village?
And what about Sixteenth Street? And Seventeenth? And
Eighteenth? No, Eighteenth Street is certainly lost to an-
other style, but still, how many hairs make a beard and
what does a neighbor street need in order to join the
Village?

Now the traditional locus of the Village is being
bulged outward by an American need to build a bigger,
better headquarters for nonconformity: There is the chic
Fifth Avenue Village, extended up East Eighth Street;
there is the clean, new, monumental and boring Washing-
ton Square Village development, which replaced an old
slum just south of Washington Square with a huge tene-
ment cake of glass and aluminum (abstract expressionist
paintings in the lobby); there are the rehabilitated Italian
and Irish slums adjoining, and the refurbished dockside
tenements, and a general groaning and heaving of the
land as real-estate developers rush in to discover "the
charm of Village living/' Some brilliant mice seem to have
discovered a deep truth: Build a better people trap and the
world will beat a path to your door. All you have to do is
stand in front of a building in a suit with wide lapels and
the crusted bricks come slipping down, thinking they recog-
nize a builder.

The Village's first stock-brokerage office has opened on

GREENWICH VILLAGE - 199 -

Sixth Avenue, around the corner from the offices of The
Village Voice, on ground hallowed by the tread of pa-
trolling actors, artists, technocrats, ancient crones, homo-
sexuals; it lies catty-corner across from the Women's House
of Detention, a dismal warehouse in which prostitutes,
shoplifters, junkies, molls, accessories-after-the-fact are kept
in inventory. Occasionally the girls stored in their coolers
grow restive, as growing girls will do; they lean against the
bars and holler at each other, or bang their eating tools,
screaming curses or impractical invitations into the street.
Now the stroller below, wild with desire, can shout back
up at them the bid and asked price on General Electric
or A.T.&T., fresh off the tape.

Today the Village seems, to those for whom it was
a part of their youth, like one of those jigsaw puzzles in
which you put together the two hundred pieces and are
rewarded with a vision of a sylvan glen and a perfect
beauty dawdling from a rope swing, dressed only in her
smile. Under "B" in the index of a book on the post-World
War I Village, we find these entries: Babbittry; Basement
tenements; Birth control clinics; Block, the, as a unit;
Bodenheim, Maxwell; Bohemianism, pseudo; Bohemians,
out-and-out; Bookbinding; Bourgeois morality; Bourgeois-
romantic family; Bricklayers; Broccoli; Butchers' shops.

The non-"B" pieces of the puzzle, for those now sud-
denly middle-aged, also include the speakeasies, the old
Nick's, Dixieland jazz, the anarchists and Communists
and Martha Graham, the Waldorf Cafeteria, rent parties,
the Masses, Howard Scott (founder of Technocracy),
Floyd Dell and Joe Gould (founders of Floyd Dell and
Joe Gould), Eugene O'Neill and a few dozen other of the
dear departed, and the ageless troglodyte on every block
who lived for some harmless madness of dress or manner
or erotic preference. Gone, all gone; or if still there, so
changed as to be occasion of deep deception to our nostal-
gia-bound visitor.

200 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

And yet, each piece in the eternal jigsaw game has its
equivalent today, right now: the White Horse Tavern,
the Five Spot for progressive jazz, the cooperative galleries
on East Tenth Street which represent the avant-garde of
the abstract expressionist habit, the beatniks and the hip-
sters and the dance students and the Actors Studio gangs,
Jim Atkins' glassed-around short-order place on Sheridan
Square, the Rienzi and the Figaro coffee houses, a host
of vocal painters and sculptors, like Larry Rivers and Ibram
Lassaw, and the poets a-reading of the jagged truth in
the jazz-and-poetry emporiums like the Bizarre on West
Third Street. And so our middle-aged visitor reconstructs
the puzzle, every piece falling neatly into place. And yet
the vision of a sylvan glen and ardent promise may elude
his critical eye, for the crucial elements which give it all its
excitement the eye and hand and moiling heart of the
puzzle-fitterare irrevocably altered. The puzzle needs an
organizing principle for its message to be unscrambled, and
this principle seems to come from the hot blood within,
that first sweet youthful discovery of freedom, passion and
rebellion. And thus the word: "The Village isn't what it
used to be/'

But if those who came to the Village during the De-
pression utter this mournful complaint, so now do those
who traveled toward Charles Street on or off the GI Bill
after the war. They too, settled into the second marriage
and third child, or into some combination of those ele-
ments, having taken on a permanent job and the habit
of having habits, must mutter to their wives on their
Saturday-night tour: "Ah, the San Remo is spoiled. Ah,
what' s happened to the old White Horse?"

"Yes, honey, and a bunch of lousy dykes has taken the
place of those divine lesbians/'

"Yes, darling, and where is Death (the magazine
which answered Lz/e), and where, O where is Neurotica

GREENWICH VILLAGE - 201

(the analysts have their journals, now it's time for the
patients to have one)?"

Answer: the Village has always moved fast A gener-
ation lasts only a few seasons. Death has died, honey, and
the editor of Neurotica has moved to St. Louis.

But if these visitors look at the girls down from Sarah
Lawrence, searching for the ghost of poor Dylan (whom
they could have saved by pure love, of course) or the
shadow of Jack Kerouac (who needs them, dig?), squired
by boys remembering that they were Holden Caulfield in
some other, better life, these veterans of old Village cam-
paigns must see familiar faces their own. The Village
jumps tirelessly to its eternal role as the objective expression
of an urge to rebel, strike out anew, break the barriers of
convention and (very important) have something to shock
the old folks about And in one case out of ten thousand,
of course, this "crise d'originditi juvenile" as a French
psychologist named it, leads to that essential human crisis
of discovery and creation. The habit and trapping of re-
bellion may involve rebellion in fact, and the destruction
of worn-out ways of thinking, and the creation of works
of mind and art.

For the remaining 9999, they have at least had a fling,
some art movies and some pizza late at night, something to
be nostalgic about in ten years, when "the Village has
really changed, pal we didn't used to have bomb shelters
on Sullivan Street"

Like the mating salmon swarming up the Columbia
River, the girls seeking freedom and "self-expression" rush
down from the smart women's colleges; they head eastward
from the big state institutions, their fins ajiggle and their
gill slits pulsing; they forgather for adventure and true
love in Manhattan, and a high percentage naturally finds
its way to Greenwich Village. The result is a highly ab-
normal situation in many of the professions: an oversupply

202 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

of lovely ladies. In the theatre, for example, there are more
women than men to begin with; then if you subtract from
the pool of available manpower doing service at dinner
and bed those men who are contentedly married, those
who are already engrossed by one girl, and those who prefer
non-girls, you have remaining a lovely turmoil of lovely
lost ladies, wishing they knew somebody. Because they
work hard, they know few people outside the theatre. They
spend many an evening walking the dog up and down
Tenth Street, dreaming that somewhere in God's Green
Village there must be a foot-loose heterosexual. Probably
the loneliest girls in the world are theatrical beauties,
alien as this idea is to the American fantasy of the wild
life of actresses.

In days gone by, men went to the Village to hunt
women. Now they go to be hunted; there is a remarkable
contemporary tendency of the prey to track down the
hunter.

A special example of Village devotion to Thespis is a
girl we shall call Norma, a long-legged, creamy-skinned
brunette with crisp dramatic gifts and a stubborn crush
on Shakespeare and Shaw. Most actors, no matter what
their preferences, take the jobs offered them. Norma, who
has a degree in theatre from Carnegie Tech, fanatically
refuses roles in musicals and contemporary plays because
she doesn't want to risk a threat to her classic style.
Therefore she makes her living, between productions of
A Midsummer Night's Dream and Caesar and Cleopatra,
by working as a skilled, albeit slightly sullen call girl. This
she does not consider corruption because only the theatre
really matters and the particular act she puts on for certain
out-of-town buyers does not affect her diction. Also she
plies her trade in the midtown expense-account belt which
she holds in contempt; "real life" for her is located on
Charles Street, where she remains a svelte young actress,
taking her breakfast at lunch time in blue jeans in a drug

GREENWICH VILLAGE 203 -

store while she reads Eric Bentley on the theatre of Bertolt
Brecht. She is considering broadening her repertoire.

Norma feels only contempt for the commercial
actresses, call them Marge and Jo, who live together in
precarious amity. Marge makes a steady living doing all
the baby voices for one of the radio networks while she
awaits an appropriate Broadway part. Jo, less successful,
wrote a book about Marge between jobs and sold it to a
paperback publisher. Since it exposed baby-voiced Marge's
love life in adult, adulterous, and unadulterated detail,
there was a strain between the two roomies which lasted
almost a week. They took their meals in separate rooms.
Marge calls Jo a fake because she had her nose bobbed
twice. Once is enough for an honest girl.

"But it wasn't short enough," wails Jo. "And it hung
a little to one side/'

"So does your bosom, sweets," says her dear friend.

At the traditional street fairs the big Italian ones
and the smaller Spanish one just north of the Village
the aging Village-lover can still find, almost unchanged,
the elements which bewitched his youth: fat, savory
sausages, fried crustaceans of mysterious varieties, sold
cheaply on the street, brilliant colors, gambling and drink-
ing and the penny-toss, Sicilian street singers crying in their
broken tenors of lost, lost love, thick-ankled, thick-waisted
beauties, with unbobbed noses, leaving streaks of lipstick
on bar glasses. On these saints' days, no injection of tourists
from uptown can dilute the amiable, loud, distracted cal-
liope pleasure of carnival nights. The parrot tells your
fortune for twenty cents, plucking a piece of paper in its
horny bill: and what care you if the somber slender gentle-
man awaiting his future in line behind you is Montgomery
Clift, and if the excited lady is Shelley Winters? The
Village has room for disconsolate movie actors, too.

The Village, while still a place for the young and

> 204 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

the undecided, is inhabited by Villagers that is, people
of all ages and conditions. The contrast between the
Village and its recent rival for the hand of Youth the
North Beach area of San Francisco tells the story clearly.
The barefoot beatniks of North Beach make the staid
diners at Chumley's on Bedford Street ("Patronized by
Writers and Artists") look like elder statesmen. When the
North Beach is invaded by middle-aged nostalgists, and the
morose beatniks settle down to raising square babies, and
there are memories and histories of "the way it was," and
novelists, playwrights, poets and painters have fixed the
scene in their work, then the North Beach will be on its
way toward becoming another Greenwich Village.

In the meantime, the Village still provides the Amer-
ican "capital of hope and paradise of misery." The more
the Village changes, settles down, rebuilds, the more it
remains the same thing. And perhaps its lack of respect
for Village tradition is a sign of its continuing vitality as
a reflection of the realities of American life. While the
Village changes under pressure, it changes in directions
molded not merely by pressure from the outside. The
quintessential rebellious Village strikes back, and the
rest of the world falters. An example of this lively, restless,
spirited Village playfulness can be found in and around
The Village Voice, a weekly newspaper which is less a
newspaper than a cause to its editors and subscribers. Hip,
unbeat, irreverent and comical, the newspaper has also
sharpened and led a drive against Tammany Hall; with
another head it has garrulously and energetically hollered
on behalf of off-Broadway theatre; it has led a victorious
and well-organized battle against New York City's all-
powerful Commissioner of Parks, Robert Moses. This
symbolic battle can very well stand for the low-level and
personal and heartening struggle of the Village against
the rampant force of commercialism.

Stately Washington Square, with its Frenchified Arch

GREENWICH VILLAGE 205

and charm one of the historical landmarks of the Village,
had been under attack from several sides. New York Uni-
versity had spread around it, cracking up some fine old
Georgian houses in its educational cobra's embrace; the
police were shoving away the girls, the dogs, the hippies,
the hobos, and the babies who played in the grass. Heavy
traffic through the little stretch of park was poisoning the
green. And then along came Moses. Unlike the Biblical
Moses, who wanted to cross the desert, this bureaucratic
Moses wanted to produce a desert by widening the road-
way through the Square, increasing traffic, renaming and
widening a narrow Village street at the opposite end. In
order to create "Lower Fifth Avenue/' an address which
would presumably suggest an increment of verbal prestige,
he was willing to destroy the park. Apparently the de-
velopers of Washington Square Village, to the south of
the Square, had been promised the Fifth Avenue label
through some mysterious political process.

Here was a clear issue. It was historical tradition versus
real estate speculation, lovers versus automobiles, folk
singers versus trucks, green versus asphalt, the people of the
Village against the arrogance of New York politicians.
With great relish, The Village Voice led its tattered batal-
lions into action. Mothers with baby carriages filled with
gallant sucklings, united legions of liberal Democrats and
progressive Republicans, students and artists and hip kids
and off-Broadway geniuses and crones from Washington
Mews whose cronish aunts remembered Henry James
all united behind a banner decorated by Jules Feiffer and
the impassioned, sometimes grammatical rhetoricians of
the Voice.

And lo, David slew Goliath. Not only did the Village
win its battle to keep the Square undiminished, but then
it also attacked and eliminated all traffic through Wash-
ington Square. The park was preserved for its stoic pursuits
chess on the permanent concrete-and-tfle chessboards

206 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

(where bundled and huffing old men study the board even
through the long winter), love, philosophy, the tranquil
digestive functioning of dogs, bongo artistry, and all the
etceteras of a city park. Robert Moses beat a sullen, scream-
ing retreat; Tammany Hall, responsive to the pressure of
bona fide, licensed, curried and voting voters, even joined
The Village Voice in its campaign, once victory seemed
inevitable.

A small victory? Perhaps. But important as a gesture
of defiance against the march of the superhighway and the
developer. It gave courage to the Save-the-Village move-
ment a-borning. And on Washington Square the bongos
and the guitars, their friends and their fellow travelers,
can still idle away a summer evening.

Partly as result of the Save-Washington-Square, Save-
the-Village, Save-Our-Geniuses campaign, mostly for its
five-year-old championing of the new hip Village, The
Village Voice has taken the title of Spokesman for the
Village away from the experimental little magazines of
an earlier period. It is in the pages of the Voice that the
various states of mind of Village youth find their public
masks. In a time of consumership, the Village way is very
much, at its most banal, a way of dressing. Village Ivy,
typified by Casual-aire, is the absolute iviest no shoulders
at all, just a slight thickening at the base of the neck, and
pants so tight that they drive a man's dangling participles
someplace up near his belt, and the tie stuck to the Adam's
apple with a small, invisible thumbtack, Village jeans are
either the Actors Studio variety, white at the knees from
praying for failure in deep Tennessee Williams scenes, or
stained like an unsigned Jackson Pollock canvas. Subsidiary
Village costumes include the students' heavy-knit sweaters
and corduroy, the bull-dykey or rough trade's black-leather
jackets, studded with nails, and the sailor suits wandering
down Fourth Street, looking for professional company on

GREENWICH VILLAGE 207

strip row. The Village Voice appeals to these costumes and
to the occasional human beings within, giving special
emphasis to the hipsters and their faded, anemic cousins,
the beatniks. It also parodies itself, as in this want
ad: "RENT A BEATNIK FOR YOUR PARTY. REASONABLE RATES."
The flavor of The Village Voice, and through it, of
the changing Village of the Sixties, can be indicated by a
quick review of one issue taken at random. On the front
page there are photographs showing the actors and actresses
of the Circle in the Square moving to a new theatre on
Bleecker Street. Reason: a new apartment development
will replace the theatre, Louis' Tavern and other historic
monuments on Sheridan Square. There is also a news
story about a quarrel between Tammany Hall and Green-
wich Village Democrats. On page two there is a feature
story about a Villager who once walked a few blocks east
of the Village to make a famous documentary film, On
the Bowery, and then went several thousand miles away to
make a film about apartheid in South Africa. Also a cartoon
by Jules Feiffer, an advertisement for a lecture on "Love,
Justice and Adultery" at the Village Liberal Church, an
advertisement inviting us to "CONSULT FAMED HINDU"
("Astrologer and Teacher of Yoga"), and offers of jobs
to mandolin players, and an invitation to tour Scandinavia
by motorcycle. Sometimes in this section young men,
"handsome, intelligent, strong/' offer to show lonely
women the Village for a moderate fee. Page three contains
the news flash that Allen Ginsberg, author of How/, has
gone to the University of Conception, Chile, to represent
the United States at a writers' conference. He is quoted
as saying that there is a difference between the Chilean
university and a beatnik Hilton coffee shop in Dallas, to
which he had refused an invitation. On page four there is
another Feiffer cartoon about a man who suffers all sorts of
ailments, and therefore thinks he has become dangerously
neurotic; turns out that he has a cold. A long article mourns

208 * THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

the death of Albert Camus. On page five, with more about
Camus, there are also advertisements for a lecture on James
Joyce (Headline: JAMES JOYCE!), an advertisement for
burlap to decorate your pad, and a clothing store cutely
advertising a cloth called LAD CLAD, which you just paint on
like aftershave, it's the iviest, mon. "But in the meantime,
we are also putting out all our cloth suits at special
prices . . ." On page six, we find a review of a beat maga-
zine called Exodus, announcement of a lecture on "HITLER!
The Artist As Fiend. . . . The Nazi Movement as Beat
Generation," to be given at the New School. Then follow
a couple of pages of theatre reviews, a page of sports car
and hi-fi poop, an advt for the New York Telephone Com-
pany, headed WE WERE TRAPPED IN THE WILDERNESS 70
MILES FROM TIMES SQUARE. The last pages are devoted to
miscellaneous material and the classified advertisements
which provide the Voice's most imaginative prose; they
offer opportunities for folk singers, male models, female
models, and pretty girls who "wish to sink teeth into v non
run of the mill job." Also motor scooters, guitar lessons,
used men's clothes. Also acting lessons, escort services,
books by Henry Miller. Also ski equipment, detective
services, and free cats for cat lovers.

The Village Voice specializes in exploration of the
new mental and physical geography of the Village. It pro-
vided one of the first boosts given The Connection, a "jazz
play" written by twenty-seven-year-old Jack Gelber and per-
formed by the Living Theatre, a group of living actors
over on the north end of the Village at living Fourteenth
Street. The play has no conventional plot; it includes,
among its actors, an instrumental group which occasionally
takes time out from the diddling movement of the play to
make a bit of dawdling jazz; the situation is that of a
group of junkies waiting, just waiting for its fix. When
Cowboy, the connection, finally arrives, and gives an in-
jection of heroin on stage, strong men blanch or so the

GREENWICH VILLAGE 209 *

publicity says and strong girls want to run up on stage
to help. "That's the way it is, that's the way it really is,
man/ 7 intones a sepulchral voice at intervals during the
evening.

Heroin seems to replace politics as subject for talk in
the Village of I960, though just as there were always more
fellow travelers than Communists, so there are more
beatniks than genuine, hypo-carrying hipsters. (Colonel
Rudolph Abel, who eked out his living as a Russian spy,
was eccentric even for the Village, and his paintings were
objective, square.) Like the gossipaceous politics of the
Thirties, the hipnik movement provides something to talk
about for a large group of bored Villagers. Most are too
cool to fall up to the Cafe Bizarre, where the poetry is read
to the jazz, mon, and too bored by teenage chicks to go
to the Figaro on Bleecker, where the floorshow seems to
consist of interracial checker playing; but espresso-shop
society has proliferated rapidly south along MacDougal
Street, penetrating even the Italian south Village, where
the strolling Amorist has his choice of many plain and fancy
mausoleums Le Petit Coin, the Couch, etc. where to
sit with a girl for a long slow evening. At the Cafe Rienzi,
for example, there are French, Italian, German and Swiss
newspapers available for free browsing with your Java, and
if you are really far out, equipped with the lingo of finance,
they also carry copies of The Wdl Street Journal. The
Rienzi is split-leveled, split-sexed, and carries a bulletin
board and exhibitions of photographs.

MacDougal Street is the hub of life for the couples
known as Bronx Bagel Babies and A-Trainers the home-
based kids who come down for excitement in the Village
and the Harlem tourists who help to give it to them. The
latter are called A-Trainers because they take the Inde-
pendent subway back at the end of the day.

If you invade the scene on foot and wander down
Waverly Place of a soft spring evening, the following acts

210 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

might succeed each other in rapid succession on the stage
of the Village: there is that solemn, sallow, cinematogra-
phically evil chap who perpetually waits in a doorway,
selling what? numbers or ponies or marijuana; a man
ambles by wearing one earring two would be square; a
male begger asks, "Gimme a quarter, mister, so my wife
can buy a Dior dress"; a load of abstract expressionist
paintings is being carried into the Manufacturers Trust
bank, where they will be exhibited along with naturalistic
dollars; one of the moving men has a copy of Andr6 Gide's
Theseus in his back pocket moving men are among the
intellectual aristocrats of the Village, and it's a chic way
for a muscular actor or writer to supplement his income
and also keep in condition; a model walks toward Wash-
ington Square, where she has a date to meet under
the Arch so skinny she looks as if she has been stretched
on a rack; and there is ubiquitous, bearded Sam Kramer
again, the psychoanalytic jewelry maker, buying cream
cheese, and a certain practicing psychologist, the rack him-
self, walking to meet the model.

Then if you happen to have reason for ducking down
the subway entrance and emerging in midtown Manhattan,
all is hurry, hurry, hurry, and you see why people love to
dwell near where Sam Kramer buys his cream cheese and
that psychologist does his best to fatten up skinny models.

All these varied societies hipters, beatniks, Harlem,
Bronx and Brooklyn adolescents, Madison Avenue middle-
classniks, artists and actors, jowly rakes, Italian old-timers,
sailors, college students, cream cheese buyers meet and
mill about together on the crowded weekend streets of the
Village. If we walk into the Cock and Bull, we may almost
think ourselves in an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. It
is a large barnlike room which used to be a book-store and
now sells sundaes with fancy names like "Orgy," costing
as much as $2.50 for enough ice cream to choke your maw
for keeps. But unlike the old-fashioned ice cream parlor,

GREENWICH VILLAGE 211

the jukebox blares far-out numbers by the Coasters and
the walls are decorated with posters from off-Broadway
plays and the kids wear faces of premature cunning and
boredom. The girls are mostly jailbait chicks, radically
underage and looking it in their baby fat, pedal pushers,
unskillful mascara, and ponytails. The men are hungry
chaps who may be as old as forty. The Cock and Bull seems
to specialize in men who like girls who like ice cream. On
the bulletin board in back there are notices about sharing
apartments, buying Vespas, providing secretarial services.
One poetry-loving chick offered to type poetry free, a small
charge for prose.

The great current intellectual fad, all over the Village,
is the beatnik convulsion. The beatniks have been described
by an acute English observer, Malcolm Bradbury, as
"Nihilism's Organization Men," since like all corporate
types, they tend to convene and stratify. The Village is
their Eastern headquarters, just as the North Beach area
in San Francisco houses the main Western office. There
has been much confusion about hip and beat; this con-
fusion can be examined in objective detail on the streets of
Greenwich Village at night.

The hipster was a man who fled emotion through the
use of narcotics, keeping cool, floating in his high; the
beatnik is an imitation hipster, wearing the clothes and
loitering at the door of the club. Allen Ginsberg and
Kenneth Rexroth, the most original of the hip writers,
generated a small literary following, including Jack Kerouac,
Gregory Corso, and Norman Mailer, and attracted admirers
among those who looked at jeans and fast driving and said,
"Here is Real Life! Wow!" Alternating between San Fran-
cisco and New York, the hip and beat publicists recruit
the kids into wearing free-form jewelry and saying "man"
to each other. While the Village has its marvelous charm
of irregularity, this should not be confused with the sort
of passionate independence which provides the seedbed of

212 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

genius. An avant-garde is always egotistical, self-devoted,
convinced; it raises its voice, angrily and even shrilly, in
order to be sure that it is heard. The pseudo avant-garde,
like the hipster writers, has a distracted self-regard, troubled
to be alone, weak-egoed rather than egotistical, and raises
its voice desperately, like a deaf man, in order to make
sure it has a voice. Not to be heard, but to be reassured.

As the naturalist Fabre wrote of the Sacred Beetle,
it is sometimes worshiped by the easily awed, "a veritable
living gem, shining like polished metal," but nevertheless
its main activity consists in collecting great balls of dung,
rolling them about, occasionally stealing from a friend, and
finally, in some dark hideaway, proudly dining. These
stercoriculous beasties clear the fields and serve good pur-
pose; perhaps we praise them so exotically because they
destroy their handiwork by eating it unlike the beat
rhapsodists, they are satisfied to hide it from our exploring
nostrils.

Perhaps the most successful work of art produced by
the hipsters, after Allen Ginsberg's exciting vaudeville
Howl, is the campy movie Pull My Daisy, which stars Gins-
berg (playing a beat poet), Gregory Corso (playing a beat
poet), and Peter Orlovsky (playing a beat poet), plus the
painter Larry Rivers and others, with a narration spoken
(gargled, mumbled, yawped) and written (improvised, he
says) by Jack Kerouac, the beat prose writer. A distinctly
Village product, it was photographed in the lower Village
by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, beat photographer and
beat painter, respectively; and it shows the whole beat
crew just goofing in a cold-water flat among all kinds of
cockroaches "sugar cockaroaches," intones Kerouac,
''bread cockaroaches . . . peanut butter cockaroaches"
while various human accidents occur, such as the arrival
of a "Zen bishop" with his mother who carries an American
flag between her legs, a bit of wrestling among the poets,
and a fight between a man and his wife, who objects to the

GREENWICH VILLAGE 213

poets just fagging around underfoot all the time. Whether
intentionally or not; the film is funny and has an in-group
charm.

Despite their futile gab, or perhaps because of it, the
hipsters and their fleas give a strong flavor to the Village,
like their allies, the homosexuals. Something relatively new
in America, there is now open professional solicitation of
men in the area around the corner of Sixth Avenue and
Eighth Street, with a full assortment of blondined boys and
leather-jacketed rough trade. Very late at night, when the
hazard of true love seems to give way to the certainties of
cash money, the male prostitutes stand waiting in the
doorways, like chippies everywhere, gossiping with each
other, falling silent when a possible mark strolls by. They
murmur Rodgers-and-Hart show tunes, substituting the
pronoun "he" for "she"; they lift their delicate heads; they
stroke their cheeks and stand very close to their pants; they
push forward their bellies in a parody of the model's pelvic
pout.

Then in the morning, at Pam-Pam or Jim Atkins', they
take long leisurely breakfasts, standing like Air Force officers
in a hundred familiar movies, discussing their missions of
the night before, the successful raid and the downed flight,
checking with the queens from friendly squadrons, loitering
over the third cup of coffee and blinking in the smile of
sun through the window. Occasionally, confusingly, a
beautiful girl joins them for breakfast, an actress or a
model, secure in the sanitary devotion of men who want
nothing from a woman but praise.

And sometimes at breakfast a tender mixed couple,
man and woman, rising late after the night before, holding
hands at the counter.

And sometimes a handsome Village mother, wheeling
her baby carriage, doing the shopping after sending her
husband off to paint in his studio, or write, or sell space.

214 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

The Village has set sail for the future, like all of
unanchored America, set sail or set adrift, take your choice.
A visit to the Village always provokes a crisis of nostalgia
in those who have moved on but do not want the Village
to move on. The lovely, long-legged blonde girl who used
to be seen strolling with Sam Kramer, the bearded jewelry
maker gone. The Waldorf Cafeteria, where the bums and
the junkies and Maxwell Bodenheim convened all night
over moldy prunes and coffee gone, replaced by a bank.
Roman Marie, who used to feed the wild and the artistic
very quiet. Djuna Barnes and e e cummings in seclusion.
(It is said that a group of beat poets made a pilgrimage
one night to cummings' house on Patchin Place. "We're
poets! We're poets!" they shouted, and a ghostly voice
issued from a window: "Go away.") And Bodenheim him-
self, poet of delicate wit and ribald enthusiasm: he went
down to drink and died of blows on the head, strokes with a
knife, administered by the crazy thug with whom he shared
it seems both bottle and wife. The Brevoort Hotel,
home of elegant artists in moments of triumph gone, re-
placed by a boring luxury apartment house. The Rhine-
lander Gardens also raped by an apartment house. Joe
Gould dead. Max Eastman rich. The Group Theatre
disappeared.

And yet ...

Young Boris, proprietor of the old Borsch Bowl, dis-
penser of philosophy and black bread, is gone. But long
live Boris! Grayer, plumper, presiding over a new Borsch
Bowl, Boris lives on, garrulously, offering black bread.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, who once inhabited the
narrowest house in New York, at 73 Bedford Street, has
finished burning her candle at both ends, but next door
another artist works late into the night. This new poet of
Bedford Street inhabits a book-lined study; his lovely slim
wife stands by with coffee as he works; they can both be
seen from the street, bending over his desk, he fretting, she

GREENWICH VILLAGE 215

peacefully confident, watching with a half smile on her face,
until she taps him gently on the shoulder: "It's very late,
dear." (It turns out, alas, that this nocturnal creator is the
author of one of the important comic strips.)

And there is another long-legged blonde who can be
seen strolling with Sam Kramer, the still-bearded jewelry
maker the same beard, a similar blonde.

And there are coffee houses which have Sunday-after-
noon chamber-music recitals. And some eccentric ones
which merely serve coffee.

And Charlie Van Doren, the defrocked quiz star,
quietly writing a novel (a play?) which everyone supposes
will deal with a simple, true-hearted, slightly greedy young
quiz star who, nearly corrupted by the mass media, receives
a letter from a little old lady named Checkers, just in time
to keep him from perjuring himself before a Congressional
committee ... In Jim Atkins' eatery the odds are against
his starring in the movie version.

And the lovely fashion model who transmitted a small
crablike infestation to a whole group of poets "like that's
her protest against the whole sex-oriented system, dig,"
explained one of them, scratching. And the eager virgin
who makes a hobby of suggesting that she and her date
go back to his place so that she can take a shower and
then she takes a shower. And carries a switch-blade to make
sure that her date keeps the peace. And the girls who live
by remittances from home while they find their souls, and
seem to find them, for they usually disappear into social
work after a year or two. And the girls, girls, girls. Italo
Calvino, a distinguished Italian novelist, declared that the
most monumental, splendid, and architecturally efficient
structure he found in America was not a skyscraper but a
small flexible device; it was first modeled for him in Green-
wich Village: "Change my whole life! the dee-ah-fragum!"

There are no more rent parties, at which you paid a
small admission to dance the Charleston, eat cheap spa-

216 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

ghetti and drink bathtub gin so that your host could keep
body, soul, and furniture off the street, but there are shin-
digs like the STOMP OUT BOBBY BREEN PARTY (at Madame
Irma's Dancehall on Second Avenue) to which you are
asked to bring your own booze, although the mimeographed
invitation assures you that "BEER, MUSIC, ICE CUBES, PAPER

CUPS, THE HALL, MOXTE and GENERAL FUNKENESS are prO-

vided by the Management/' You are also warned: "This
party is by private invitation only . . . don't bring your
friends . . . don't bring good old Harry who lives in Queens
but is a nice guy . . . nor your Aunt Lucy who has always
wanted to go to a Real Village Party . . . don't hip the
Bronx ... if your girl is the kind who locks herself in the
can at parties to weep, don't bring her ... if you insist on
singing, forget it ... if your idea of a good time is charades,
we don't want you ... no marrieds except the unhappily
. . . don't tell Life magazine . . . wear a funny hat if you
like, but no costumes!" There are other parties for little
companies of off-Broadway players, who offer Gallo wine
and corrosive martinis in the hope that you may write a
check to help support their production of a symbolic drama
by lonesco, Adamov, Ghelderode, or the omnipresent re-
vival of Winterset. The actors now have pads (or live with
their hip parents in Forest Hills), and worry about unpaid
parking tickets rather than the grocery bill, but the theatre
needs a stage, brother, and the union gives us lip. Those
uptown bankrollers who used to say "nix" to the avant-garde
have now learned to say "Bug off, Buster/' It turns out that
many of us need our daily dose of anxiety. If we can't
worry about our own landlord, we'll fret about the bourgeois
proscenium type who holds the keys to the Circle in the
Square.

And so it goes in the eternal Village that impossible,
actual American dream of freedom through bohemia. Amid
all the open possibilities of American life, which permits
a young man to select any variety of togetherness he
chooses, there are many who feel constricted. They ask,

GREENWICH VILLAGE 217

Why this? Why not that? And perhaps even, Why not the
other thing? Why not try my impulse, try my luck, try my
talent, try my skills at loafing and self-generating labor?
They are squeezed in the direction of declared rebellion,
abstention, disaffiliation.

These patient and impatient yearners after truth,
beauty and easy living will always float toward the Village
the artists and the art-lovers, the worshipers of sex, the
sick and the spoiled, the young and the special and the
adventurous, all making common cause in the pleasure of
their differences. In 1960, when the pressure to do like
others is high in America, the Village takes a new shape,
molded by money. It is becoming an elegant bohemia in
which radical politics are replaced by the hip and the beat;
the bearded poets are crowded to one side by the bearded
advertising men with sports cars sold them by bearded
salesmen. Though it changes as it mirrors the times, the
Village is still necessary. It is that bottle in which Americans
put whatever the suburbs and the colleges and the middle-
class family cannot happily contain.

So listen, Herman, tell Mrs. Melville to get in line.
Come back to the Village and write poetry if you like.
Open the bottle and free the djinn yourself into the
carrousel whirl of Greenwich Village, where change is ever-
lasting and the permanent never remains the same. There's
a fellow over on Cornelia Street who looks like a homesick
Canarsie ghost returned to sell wolf pelts and otter meat on
his ancient lands. In fact, of course, he is a peaceable,
poetry-loving Arab weaver, a frequent tea drinker, who
grows irate if you call him beat "I'm a member of the
Post Beat Generation," he says with quiet dignity, shuckling
his hands in his embroidery. "The difference between us
and the beats, man, is ... Well, like we're different. Like
we affirm, man. I mean, like we protest/'

Apparently, affirmative protest is here to stay. Green-
wich Village may have ended at twelve o'clock this evening,
but it has begun again at midnight. 1960

Death in Miami Beach

THE STATE OF MADNESS can be defined partly as an extreme
of isolation of one human being from everyone else. It
provides a model for dying. Only an intermittent and frag-
mentary awareness of others interrupts the black folding
of the layers of self upon each other this also defines the
state of that dilemma known as "mental health/'

There is a false madness induced by the accidents of
isolation which prisoners, travelers, and the very ill may
sometimes experience without giving up their return ticket.
Surely you out there all know what I mean from your own
troubles and painful decisions. To say that it is false mad-
ness does not soften its extremity. The mask of existence
fits harshly on your skin, but it is in fact your only skin;
and when harshly your skin is peeled off beneath it you
are naked and your naked isolation is no joy to you.

During a period of work on a long job of writing in
the winter of 1958, I deliberately withdrew myself from
all those who knew my name and traveled by auto-
mobile in slow stages through the deep South to Miami
Beach, Key West, Havana, and finally back up toward
Detroit. No one asked me to write a novel, no one asked

218

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 219

me to go away; but I did anyway, I was tempted by the
prospect of dreaming through my story amid a pleasant
chaos of sun and sea, all other responsibilities suspended,
and so I arranged it for myself.

Work is very fine, but after the day's work, isolation,
silence, and death seemed to follow me through the zazzy
carnival of Miami, the casual resort indolence of Key West,
and the smoky, blistered elegance of a tourist's Havana.
In Havana, from the rooftop of the Ambos Mundos Hotel,
I could see Batista's police loafing with their weapons in
front of public buildings; occasionally there were bombs;
once a body happened to be left in the street and people
hurried by as if they knew nothing, nothing, nothing at
all but the next step before them.

At Key West, a few days before Christmas, I visited
the turtle slaughterhouse. It is one of the few tourist attrac-
tions on this spot of island, "North Havana," raised far
out into the sea off the coast of Florida. Visitors take their
kiddies by the hand and lead them to see the nice turtles.

Before being killed and canned, the turtles swim in
dense kraals, bumping each other in the murky water,
armor clashing, dully lurching against the high pens. Later,
trussed on a plank dock, they lie unblinking in the sun,
their flippers pierced and tied. The tough leather of their
skin does not disguise their present helplessness and pain.
They wear thick, sun-hardened accumulations of blood
at their wounds. Barbados turtles, as large as children, they
belong to a species which has been eliminated locally by
ardent harvesting of the waters near Key West, but the
commercial tradition still brings them here to be slaugh-
tered. Crucified like thieves, they breathe in little sighs,
they gulp, they wait.

At a further stage, in the room where the actual
slaughtering occurs, the butchers stride through gore in
heavy boots. The visitor must proceed on a catwalk; a mis-
step will plunge him into a slow river of entrails and blood.

220 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

Because it was near Christmastime, the owners of the
plant had installed a speaker system for musical divertisse-
ment of the butchers, and while the turtles dried under the
sun or lay exposed to the butchers' knives, Christmas bells
tolled out, electronically amplified, "God Rest Ye Merry,
Gentlemen/ 7 or the Bing Crosby recording of "Adeste
Fideles."

These commercial details are not intended to support
a special plea on behalf of the humane harvesting of Bar-
bados turtles. In fact, let me grant that I sought out this
scene and visited the abattoir without having any proper
business there at all: merely curiosity and the need to con-
firm my imagination about it. I should be judged for
vulgarity by the man who chooses out of purity not to
follow me, not by the man I saw lurking outside, with a
face ravaged by the horrified fascination which makes it
impossible for him to visit his dreams. What had I done
which he could not permit himself? Was I filthied, was I
weakened by pleasure but obscurely nourished, was I fed
on coveted turtle joys after trampling in turtle blood? Had
I asked permission from the butcher and plied a knife
with my own hands on the belly of one of the slow, un-
blinking, dragon-headed, ancient sea-beasts? And did it
arch its graceful dragon neck in reproach as I stabbed? He
stared at me like a jealous lover, imagining my wickedness,
rabid and hopeless, wanting to bury his head in the reek
on my hands.

Most of us turn from the vision of death only out of
weakness, and this is no turning from death. Serve up your
turtle steak, gourmet friend, with no protest from me;
111 eat at your table. ("A nice rendition," one gentleman
said of Bing Crosby to his wife. Turtle is tasty, somewhat
gamy meat. Protein nourishes the brain brings oxygen
and freedom.)

A few days later, in Miami Beach, I participated in
two trivial accidents. My hotel was in one of the oldest,

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 221

therefore least expensive, parts of the town, only a short
block from the sea and a short block from restaurants and
therefore very convenient to my casual schedule: breakfast
at Whelan's, a stretch of writing, a long swim, lunch, a
pleasant bit of loafing on the beach, then perhaps some
sunbaked work at my typewriter on the tar roof ("solar-
ium"), and another swim before dinner. I had the habit
in the morning of disregarding the elevator, hurrying down
a back stairway of the Webster Hotel, through an alley,
and so shortcutting to the drugstore. One day, wearing
tennis shoes, I felt an evil slide and crunch underfoot, and
knew first by the shrinking in my heart and then by simple
inspection that I had stepped on a small animal.

It seemed to be a variety of tropical cockroach. It
had been perhaps an inch and a half long, longer with its
wings spread, and it had strayed from the raised platform
nearby where the hotel stored its rubbish. Now it lay
twitching, legs scrambling in the air without moving, and
a yellow ooze seeped from its body within the crushed
carapace. I suppose it was already dead despite all this
nervous movement. I went for a walk, told myself that
this was a silly matter to be fretful about (I was merely
isolated), and finally took my habitual breakfast: orange
juice, scrambled eggs, toast, coffee.

An hour later the dead beast was glued by its own
innards to the paving of the alley; the Florida sun was
moving through the sky above it. But now there was also
a row of ants leading to it, another leading away, like
twin caterpillars dissembling their unity of purpose. They
were not merely eating, of course, they were carrying off
the meat to their hill someplace. But the dead roach still
twitched, and when the tickling jaws struck, it fluttered,
squeezed, blindly pushed in its place. The ants went
scrambling away, each carrying its minuscule steak.

All afternoon the shell of the roach lay there. Its row
of legs no longer waved of their own power, but there

222 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

were still tremors as the eating ants tugged at it. Un-
f atigued and busy, they were determined to wipe this slate
clean.

Shortly before dark I again came down the back stair-
way. Now the familiar arena had changed. Another foot
had struck, more strange and haphazard than my own.
The shell of the roach was destroyed; there were also dead
ants freckling the stone; stillness and death. The ants were
suddenly individual in death; the undulating columns were
erased. And the work of eating was permanently interrupted
for both eaters and eaten.

The next morning when I walked through the alley
no sign remained. A sweeper had done her work; there
were straight, mechanical striations a friendly broom.
Good. But I bent to look for some sign or memorial to
the departed beast on this stretch of alley which I now
knew very well. There was none. Marks of broom; new
arrangements of pebbles and dust; history here had entered
upon an epoch which was strange to me.

Then finally a homely death entered what might pass
for society in my isolated Miami Beach the world of the
soda fountain at Whelan's, where strollers came into an
air-conditioned place to shake off the sand of the beach,
sip a Coke, buy lotions and plastic sunglasses, and some-
times order a quick meal.

I was taking my breakfast, according to my habit, on
a stool at the counter. By this time I was acquainted with
Frank, the short-order cook, who had emigrated from
Second Avenue in New York twenty years ago for his health
and, for sweet health's sake, still managed to cover the
leathery pouched skin of age with a fierce Miami tan,
despite his long hours in Whelan's service. It relieved the
silence to exchange a few morning words with a man who
by now knew my face: "Two scrambled light."

"Same as yesterday, Mister."

"Yes, like yesterday/' (Triumph in my voice: He

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 223

remembers me! ) 'Whole-wheat toast. You got marmalade
today?"

"Marmalade/ 7 Frank knew my face and my eggs.

Other eaters, like me, were forking up eggs and grits
and sipping their Cokes or coffee when the woman entered.
She was blotched with sunburn, had a swollen nose, and
a mouth open so wide for noise that all her features were
distorted. Emitting emergency alarm signals, turning her
head and staring, demanding passage, demanding attention,
a shouting vehicle, she pushed a stumbling old man along
with her. "Ohh," she screamed, "a Bromo! For God's sake
a Bromo! My husband is dying, a Bromo, for God's sake!"

The man's face was blue and he seemed barely con-
scious. He swayed stiffly as she steered him toward a stool
near me.

"Oh, a Bromo right now, please!" she wailed,

Frank, behind the counter, looked sideways at her, pre-
tended the impossible that he did not hear her and
went on making a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich on
whole-wheat toast, light on the mayonnaise.

Two or three of us jumped up to support the old
man. His skin had a thick purple glow that said death to
all our eyes.

"Oh, have mercy, a Bromo for my poor husband!"
the woman screamed. "He didn't do nothing to you! For
God's sake why don't you give it to him?"

Floundering, I watched Frank finish the bee-ell-tee,
slide it onto a plate, and hand it to his customer. The hot-
rodder bent his head to the spilling sandwich and ate as
if his life depended on it, thrustingly. In the meantime, the
pharmacist, a short man in a white coat, sweating profusely
despite the air conditioning, came bustling from his cubicle
and said, "Heart attack? You want I should call a doctor,
Missus?"

"Ohh, please, dear God, a Bromo!" she shouted.

"I'll call a doctor, he'll be right over."

224 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

"Bromo for a dying man! Why don't you give it to
him? Mercy, mercy!"

The pharmacist was on the telephone and the howling
woman subsided in shrill spasms. Her husband swayed on
the stool, his eyes shut, while his wife leaned sobbing
against his back to keep him from toppling onto the
ground. She refused to let anyone touch him in order to
lay him out on the floor someone's idea as if this min-
istry would commit him once and for all to the hands
of death. Naturally, my innards shrank from this; the layers
of the self closed tight; the flower of feeling was shut, sealed.
I wanted to rush in some place, rush away; strike, destroy,
run; kill Frank, kill the hotrodder, because a man was
dying and nobody could do anything. Thus righteousness
substitutes for being straight with the world. I was sly
and scared. Thus I occupied myself with rage at my friend
Frank, who pretended to hear nothing and stubbornly
refused to make the glass of Bromo Seltzer.

During the five minutes before the doctor arrived, the
scene altered rapidly and tensely. Of course, all the break-
fasters but the determined hotrodder stopped their eating.
The kid in the leather jacket asked for pretzels with his
Coke for sustained strength behind the wheel. The rest of
us drifted, lurking behind the sick man on his stool. His
wife wept and cursed and heaved out her sobs because no
one would supply a Bromo.

Then abruptly the man shook himself and opened his
eyes and tried to stand up. He stumbled; his wife pushed
him back onto the stool. He shook his head and mumbled.
Then rapidly the purple color diminished; his eyes stopped
their blind rolling; he began to talk with his wife. He was
returning to the living. He and his wife had a whispered
consultation. She nodded rapidly at him, like a bird.

Suddenly she alighted and flew out the door. The man,
left behind on the stool, said hoarsely, "Lemme have a
glass of water, will you, pal?"

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 225

Frank gave him the water.

Now the doctor entered, rolling his sleeves down and
carrying his black bag open. He had apparently run a block
in the tropical morning heat.

"Haha!" said the formerly dying man. Just like that:
"Hahaha! Hi, Doc!"

"You're the sick man?" said the doctor. "Let's see
now "

"Hahaha! Don't touch me, Doc," said the old man,
leaning away. "Listen, Doc, it's a funny thing. My wife
gets herself all excited aggravated."

"You mean you're all right?" the doctor said.

"Just like a little attack was all I had, hahaha," said
the old man.

"You're okay?"

"Look, Doc, I ain't been eating right, you know, en-
joying myself, hahaha, A little attack. I get them sometimes.
Like a little attack is all."

"Okay," said the doctor firmly, "you don't want me to
look at you? Okay." He nodded briskly to the pharmacist,
said, "I've got a patient in my office," and trotted off again
into the heat.

The old man smiled and gazed without malice at
Frank, who had refused him the Bromo. Instead of leaving
a tip he left him one word of explanation before he headed
off after his wife. The word was deposited on the counter
behind him with an apologetic smile: "Constipation."

Eggs in tie plates of all the late breakf asters were left
cold and shiny. The hotrodder alone had finished his sand-
wich, Coke, and pretzels, and left whistling. Angry at last,
I discharged an unformulated hostility on Frank: "Why
the devil didn't you give the man his Bromo?"

His reply seems an obvious bit of logical disquisition
at this remove, but there in the shadow of panic and crisis
it struck me with the force of revelation. Rubbing a dirty
cloth on the counter formulating and reformulating a

226 * THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

smear of grease before me he said, "If he was dying of a
heart attack, what good would a Bromo do him? And if he
was not dying, what good is a Bromo?"

"Yes, but."

"So I have to do my job, but I don't have to listen to
nuts."

"But you didn't say anything! That woman was hys-
terical."

He looked at me with undisguised pity for my igno-
rance. "That's why I didn't say anything. I been in trouble
for saying things before, I learned."

He went back to work; the pharmacist was back in
his cubicle, counting pills into a bottle; the doctor had
returned to his office. It was eleven o'clock and Frank took
down the sign about the breakfast special. A man came in
frightened to ask for the special, and Frank pointed to
the sign, which was upside down on the counter, and said,
"It's five minutes after eleven already. But 111 give it to
you." The look of despair faded from the man's face.

In a few days I finished my own job and begaa the
long drive out of the false Florida summer into the north-
ern winter, my heels passing over all sorts of unf elt beasties,
my gullet accepting steaks and chops, my heart leaping
with no better welcome to death than before. In Detroit
my daughter asked me, "What's God's last name? How
big is the whole world? Where do you go when you die?"

The foregoing inconclusive words were written two
years ago. Now I have seen fit to return to my cafeteria-
and-old-folks slum on lower Collins Avenue, and osten-
sibly for the same lure of cheap sun, sky, water, beach, bore-
dom. I write, I swim. I stroll on Lincoln Road, I eat
steaks and pizza, I sniff the sea with my sunburnt beak,
I suck in my belly and run barefoot on the sand, I sleep,
I write. In front of one of the new hotels I found a nude
in plaster, beckoning, with her hand lifted as if hitching a

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 227

ride. All aboard, you masturbators. Some of the fruit juice
and hamburger stands have disappeared; new ones have
opened. The Ellis Department Store, Here Since 1919, is
closed, looks ransacked, has a box of Fruit of the Loom
T-shirts spilled in the window and a U.S. Federal Court
bankruptcy notice affixed to its sealed door.

I met a waitress in a restaurant which advertises nine-
course dollar dinners. She has a pretty, lively, thirty-five-
yearold girl's face, with all the black brightness of eye a
man could want; she turns out to be Corsican and we
speak French; an artillery sergeant brought her to Florida
and apparently tired of her brightness of eye. She has a
rattling Corsican accent, likes Edith Piaf records, and
gives me extra shrimp bits in my shrimp bits salad. So
some things change. Last time I heard no Edith Piaf and
earned no extra forkfuls of shrimp. The sirloin steak she
brings me spreads its wings and seems ready to flop off
the plate. My gut talks French and I take ease in the flattery
of food. I wait and at last she slips into my booth with me
and sighs. It is eleven o'clock, time to begin real life. Her
history is sad. I feel obliged to offer some recompense for
the evil done her by men and luck, and so I listen, won-
dering how her eyes can remain so bright as the disasters
and disillusionments unroll.

When I said good night, she replied with a funny,
rapidly fiddling, diddling, twenty-one-fingered gesture at
her mouth. I asked what it meant "Fun and glee!" she
said, "fun and glee! Maintenant je suis une vraie Atner-
icaine" Her eyes burn like stars, but like the stars, she has
darkness between them.

A day and a night and another day. The first week
passes.

I eat salty bagels in the sun, I listen to the teenage
girls after school wiih their curious mixture of Florida
cracker and Bronx accents. I go back into the damp of
my room the peculiar dank assault of cheap tropical bed-

* 228 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

rooms and think my novel through once again, examining
the pile of manuscript with my intentions in motion like
a column of ants working over the struggling body of an
insect. And when the life seems to weaken, I leave it and
go out onto the beach or into the street.

Madness consists partly in an extreme of isolation?
Partly. But the demented tumble down from their asso-
ciations and memories into other associations and mem-
ories; they are sent away into the future with a map of
the past which conforms to no agreed past and to no
other map and yet it is their only chart, their history
and route, their needs which are unfailingly present. The
lonely traveler also brutally inflicts absolute possession of
his movements upon the endless day, and the novelty of
what he sees joins him in yet another way to his deepest
desires and dreads. He returns, he never lets go. There is
no escape even in isolation; there is no isolation, merely
interrupted and distorted association, until death claims
us. Then every man is an island entire of itself.

In love, we seek freedom and purity even more than
the comfort of diminished isolation. Those few fortunate
ones who have the talent can bear the paradox of love.
The rest of us are harassed by our contradictory demands
join me, make me free. With age and aging, the model
of all voyages (learn and grow, diminish and weary), comes
final approach to the ultimate simplicity which love seeks
to confound death. A paradox forever out of balance
to answer a grave black simplicity: we are ill used. The facts
we make for ourselves disappoint the intentions with which
we make them. The opposable thumb, which is said to
be responsible for civilization and history, give us no
answers here, though with it we can grasp our pens and
break insects in our hands. Finally we die, opposable
thumbs and all.

In the meantime, I visit my story. We exchange visits.
I laugh over it, frown and worry over it, and urge it for-

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 229

ward. Then I leave it for the Miami streets. The book
follows me; it does not let me visit unaccompanied; it
enters me instead and I try to shake it off as an adept at
voodoo fights against possession by the importunate god.
The opposable thumb is of no use in this contest; both
the prize and the weapons have reached beyond tools, even
tools of thinking; I am the quadruple god's horse dream
of love, hope of meaning, joy of power, relish in being.
Too much burden on one soul. Who asked me to feel
sorry or glad for others? They were merely pious who asked
me. Why follow their orders? I decide: I ^on't. But I
cannot escape my self, which also gives orders. The flower
of feeling opens; the flower shuts; it obeys the freshness of
weather. All emotion flowing from health or illness par-
takes of the pathetic fallacy, identifying moral value with
the gifts of nature. My feet want to run; I am wearing
Keds, and feel light on the foam rubber soles; but the heat
of the sun holds me to earth.

There is a hotel on Washington Boulevard which
specializes in "economical, comfortable living for the re-
tired." It is a huge dark building like the Women's House
of Detention in Greenwich Village, but without the bars
on the rooms, and there are purple lights playing on the
palm trees outside, soft music piped throughout the
grounds, and the frequent blare of a loudspeaker: "Missus
Goldberg to the telephone! Missus Goldberg! Sadie, answer
the phonel" when the children call from New York. The
streets of the neighborhood are filled with chattering of
mournful elder statesmen, mostly losers after sixty years of
continual negotiation, men with chagrined pouches slipping
sideways beneath their eyes, women with hair bursting onto
their cheeks and upper lips, as if all at once, near the end,
they have decided to make a final try at being better men
than their husbands.

To walk through the crowd during the hour following
their afternoon naps is to wade in senility. There is a

230 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

deep-sea lack of light despite all the sun and brisk resort
clatter; you gasp for life and run to look in a dusty window.
Narcissus wants to be just thirty-five, "nel mezzo del cam-
min di nostra vita" and not seventy, not seventy! The
crowd flutters by. "She thought she could be my daughter-
in-law! A girl like that! To be my daughter-in-law! And
you know what? Now she is/' "I used to be in business. I
had a good business. It was a nice store, good location.
Furniture. I should have kept my location/ 7 "What does
the weather report say? Does the weather report ever say
anything but the weather?" "Moishe died. He had an
attack. Well, we all got to go/'

Is it the same voice, the same rhythm? It is the same
crowd grief, isolation, death. There almost always seems
to be an ambulance pulling up or pulling away.

It is fine to tell a story, which feels like affirmation,
but afterwards, after the morning's writing, then what?
Writing is an expression of affirmation, power, longing,
but not a proper cause of these emotions in the writer.
He is a guide into delight and dread because he can
escape victimization (he thinks); he has left a little trail
of paper behind him as he threads his way into the maze,
and can find his way back (he believes though the roar
of the maze sets up a disarray in anything as fragmentary
as his intentions about return). He tracks the minotaur
with an open mind. "Maybe 111 like it," he says, "and
maybe I won't. At least I'll see/' He initiates passion only
because he has it otherwise self-delusion and covetous
self-therapy. And so it is not good to be alone for long,
entirely alone.

But at least for a time, until they dim out, loneliness
sharpens the eyes. I feel like a safecracker; loneliness has
also sharpened my fingertips, and my entire body through-
out feels the clicking tumblers as I yearn toward the com-
bination. I come to focus, I work. But afterwards, then
what? I have retreated from the distractions of Manhattan.

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 231

There are no telephone calls. No friendship, no duties, no
hazards of pique or pleasure. I shall work till the battery
runs down, frozen and stilled by this busy emptiness under
the sun. I ask myself: Can the silent column of ants re-
construct the living roach at its leisure underground? No,
only a tree can make a tree, only a winged roach can make
a winged roach. A column of ants works by an invisible
will which resides in no one of its jointed parts, but only a
swollen green ant can breed an urgent ant.

As I walk on Lincoln Road, the smart shopping area
of "the Beach/' I ogle the oglers, the sunburned sun-
worshipers basted with oil, cream, tonic, and lotion the
touts, boxers, fairies, grandmothers, exiled Cubans, local
hotrodders and their gumchewing molls, sportsmen, natty
invalids in gabardine, drunks, stockbrokers, antique col-
lectors, Semites and anti-Semites all taking the air to-
gether on Lincoln Road. Hill people, swamp people, and
ex-pugs sell newspapers flown in from all over New York,
Chicago, Los Angeles ("Smogsville!" cackles a refugee).
And New York is harried by flu and Chicago is black with
coal and damp. And here we all are on Lincoln Road, with
a delicious breeze, courtesy of the steakhouse pumping
cool air into the street. So let's buy the hometown paper
to see how miserable we might have been, for others are.

On Lincoln Road, fair Lincoln Road in Miami Beach,
the Negroes have been freed; freed of existence, that is;
only a few black ghosts slip discreetly by. Even if they
were not so discreet, they would be invisible, though for
a new reason: they are going someplace, namely, to work,
or at another hour, home. For them, Lincoln Road is a
mere artery for transit, while for the others, Lincoln Road
is parlor, sunroom, promontory into health and beauty.
For the visitors, Lincoln Road is a slow matter, a recipe
for yearned-for slowness, sloth, strolling ease, delicacy of
control. The cocky Broadway chapparoonies are wearing
their new pleatless "Miami-Tailored Daks/' Their bellies

232 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

do the work of belts, hiding the place where belts would
be. Now I'm so slow I don't need a belt, the pants proudly
announce; Fm just walkin' along, just struttin' down
the avenue, just here and pleasant with myself, and
when I take a breath, the expandable elastic waistband ex-
pands with me. In the men's room of a bar off Lincoln
Road, hung with photographs of wrestlers, there is a curious
vending machine which is decorated with a crown and
raised scepter and submits a product called DE-LA: "Say
Delay, a light lubricating ointment designed to aid in the
prevention of premature climax. Odorless. Safe. Stainless.
Easy to apply. Directions on package. 50^ coins only.
Machine does not give change."

Machine makes comment, however. Machine is trying
to tell us something.

The Negro girl who cleans my room gets yelled at,
screamed at, all morning. "Stupid, stupid, stupid! A single
room only gets two towels, one face, one bath!" She smiles
slyly to herself as if she knows where the manager's DE-LA
is hidden. This is the southland, I am reminded, where we
have grits for breakfast. But it is not quite dat ole Dixie,
boss, which changeth not, nor can age alter it. It is Miami
Beach. The Sholem Aleichem Literary Society ("Managed
by Tourists Managed for Tourists") has a For Rent sign
on it "Owner Will Remodel for Any Business."

I decide as I walk: I'll write my book till the battery
runs down, though distraction seems necessary; other duties,
friends, "real life."

The sirens of the police ambulances work up and
down the Beach all day and night, announcing the news
as they carry away the attacked, the fallen, the stroked,
the perished. A population of the aged sheds its members
at the merest trifle of an excuse a bottle of cold pop in
the sun, a skipped nap, somebody raising his voice sud-
denly or no excuse at all. It touches life and someone
dies. It treads carelessly and someone dies. The sirens

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH - 233

whir and howl and Negroes courteously open the back door
for the corpse. For some reason people smile at the am-
bulance as they stroll, sucking ice cream. Perhaps they
dream of an accident, a distraction: Siren meets 'white
Thunderbird, boy of forty cut off in his prime, had a girl
in there -with him, not his wife. Perhaps thinking: Not me
this time.

One of those impossible coincidences. Today I met
Dr. Meyer leading his blind wife. He was our family doctor
in Cleveland, addicted to practical jokes, who always said
he wanted to do research, and in fact he had some sort
of connection with one of the important drug laboratories.
When he retired from practice, he announced to my
parents over a bottle of wine that now he would begin his
true life's work. I had decided that his practical jokes,
bought in Jean's Fun House on East 9th Street buzzers,
false flies, stomach noises, leaky cups were a symptom of
childish anger at adult responsibility. But now that he could
retire from practice and try his hand at research. ... It
turned out that his wife had inoperable cataracts; she went
blind fast, and he went sour, quiet, mean; and they left
Cleveland for Miami Beach, where I saw him leading her,
walking with the stiff, frightened step of the unaccustomed
blind. He is shrunken; only today do I notice that he is a
small man when I was a boy, he was immense. At present,
and forever until the very end, his life's work is to steer his
wife to the beach in the morning and sit with her to
describe what he sees. He has replaced both practical jokes
and dreams of a laboratory with loyalty to his wife, but vir-
tue has made him a furious runt

Fantasies of thighs, breasts, bellies as I nap on the
beach. I awaken, sticky with salt. My nose is peeling. Shall
I visit the Corsican waitress again tonight? Shall I ask the
Meyers to dinner? But I have made this disappearance into
Miami Beach in order to avoid the troubles of others and
of myself. I swim again. I doze again. I dream of sex with a

234 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

woman I overheard describing the proper way to kill a
chicken "so it don't suffer. You ask anyone, they'll tell you.
And there's nothing like fresh-killed chicken. You can't
trust the butchers."

A man in the coffee shop later said to the cashier: "I
been sick, that's why you ain't seen me. Doctor said cor-
onary thrombosis. You ever heard of that?"

"Naw. Lots of people got coronaries, but that throm-
bosis, that's a new thing. The docs keep finding new things
so they can charge us."

'Well, I'll tell you, it left me feeling pretty weak."

I went one night to see a road company version of My
FaiT Lady at the Miami Beach Auditorium, which more
frequently provides hospitality for wrestling or boxing
matches. A maggoty, bored imitation of Rex Harrison, a
thick Eliza without any bounce. The audience is quietly
taking in the famous sight. They write on their postcards
home: Tonight we saw a Broadway show, but the girl
was fat.

Crazy Louie on the beach a frantic grandfather with
Latin records, maracas, castanets, silk Cuban shirts, feathers,
straw skirt, rubber Halloween masks, a huge earring loosely
hooked to his ear by a bent hairpin, thick glasses sliding
down his nose, leathery withered legs, dancing and danc-
ing, all sinews and grins and shakes to some inner song
while the portable phonograph goes rattie-and-scrape,
screech, rattle, and scrape. Amazingly, the crowd which
regularly gathers on the sand nearby seems to enjoy his
music; some of them shake, too, dreaming of the days when
they had lust to squander on their legs. Dr. Meyer's wife
smiles as he describes the scene. "Are you smiling, Meyer?"
she asks. He says yes, but is lying. Crazy Louie bangs his
Castanet under her nose and screams "O/e!" and she jumps.
At last Dr. Meyer smiles.

Then he tells her that sometimes the beginnings of
arteriosclerosis can be detected at age twenty-five. "Cuts

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 235

off the blood supply to the brain. The psychiatrists think
they're smart, but they can't do anything about the histo-
logical system. The brain dries up like a scab."

"Meyer, you shouldn't use such language."

"You mean histology?"

"I mean scab, Meyer."

Crazy Louie is dancing and cackling, kicking sand. The
old ladies in their bathing skirts fan themselves contentedly
as he enters his Afro-Cuban apocalypse. On the beach
there is a rural, village tolerance of madness. Louie doesn't
do any harm. His children sent him down. He is new since
my last visit.

And where are my old friends?

The cockroach in the alley is long gone, of course, and
its grandchildren unto many generations. But I have found
cheap sun again for my sinus, and white ocean breaking
against the distractions of Manhattan in winter, spring,
summer, fall. I think of a friend, a Jewish chauvinist, argu-
ing with his girl: "When your people were still living in
trees and hitting each other with sticks, my people already
had sinus trouble."

The Spinoza Forum is gone, replaced by a motel. Dr.
Wolfson still goes to the beach every afternoon. But the
neighborhood is changed. He has nothing to say to me
except that raw beets, honey, and tangerines keep a man
virtuous and healthy, no matter what his age.

The woman who knew Thomas Wolfe did I forget
to mention that last time? and swam as if she wanted
to die, and worked as a B-girl . . . gone. She wanted to
reconstruct some cabin-in-the-woods dream of perfection,
but she could never find the missing pieces. Life is not a
jigsaw puzzle; once it has been scrambled, the old picture
is gone.

The racing-car driver with whom I chatted a couple
of times at breakfast gone.

The column of ants at the cockroach gone.

* 236 THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

The drummed-up acquaintances even their names
forgotten.

The hotel clerk who wanted to explore in Guatemala
perhaps he is exploring in Guatemala. The new manager
of the hotel has never even heard of him.

And the man who died dead.

I know this for certain, for I have finally discovered
an old friend. Frank, the gray bozo behind the counter
at Whelan's, is still there. I had taken up new eating habits
and did not return to Whelan's during my first week in
Miami Beach, but then I did and found him, still building
hamburger platters and scrambling eggs. At first he did
not remember me. He never knew my name. When I
reminded him of the incident about the man who died,
and of our long breakfast friendship, a look of irritation
captured his face demands were being made on him
but then his cross mug creased into a smile. He did re-
member me! He only needed to be reminded!

"You know that old fool," he said. "Later really did
die. He's dead. Later died."

There was a new cat in the store. A new special on
toothbrushes. A new pharmacist.

I had a hamburger on our old friendship, and Frank
put an extra slice of tomato on the side to prove that he
remembered me. But why should he? He had been an
experience for me the same now, with balder eyebrows
but what was I to him? For me he existed as an example
of something, a moment of frightening history, a troubled
memory which I had set down in words. I had needed a
friend then, but he did not I was frightened by death then,
and worse, by a way of receiving death, but he was not
and perhaps never admits that he might be.

Why does he stay in Miami Beach?

Yes, for a job. Yes, for the sun. But why there?

All right, then why not there?

Why do I go back?

DEATH IN MIAMI BEACH 237

Why did I go back? What happened to those dead
and dying ones? They died and were dead; they were
swept away. I thought, the first time I went to Miami
Beach, that I had made a free choice to be isolated, but
I discovered that everyone comes to the state of isolation
in time though not freely. What I did out of apparent
health and youth, in the pleasure of work, those others
did in sickness and age, in the anxiety of boredom. But
eventually work is done, health turns to decay, youth
turns to ripeness turns to age; feebleness and dying must
precede death except for fighter pilots, who are anach-
ronisms. Miami Beach is an extension, adult education
course in how to die, pursued with great seriousness by the
enrollees. The old folks work at it with deliberate and
modest intensity, in group sessions, complimenting each
other on their tans, their sport shirts, their postgraduate
skill at finding a proper weather. The young vacationers
flush in on packaged tours, immerse themselves in the
ceremonial indulgences of resort hotels, eat, swim, and
enjoy their honeymoon wrestling, take in Eartha Kitt or
Leo de Lion, sigh with boredom and excess, buy bottles of
Man Tan at the air terminal ("Arrive With Fresh Sun
On Your Cheeks!"), and flee back to real life with a secret
conviction that this is leisure? Strictly for the birds, brother.

That first time in Miami Beach, I was a curious ob-
server, obscurely moved, with the face of a man who fear-
fully unwinds a rope as he visits his dream of the turtle
slaughterhouse. The second time (the last time!), two
years' change had begun to discover my implication to me;
I broke the rope; the model of death is real; the dream
of dying is real. The tanned, reduced, heliotropic Doctor
Meyer recognized me despite his wife's blindness ("Han-
nah! Look who's here!"), and when I spoke to her, she
gropingly embraced me. This was why I went back to
feel Mrs. Meyer's arms hotly convulsed about my neck,
as if I were still a boy in Cleveland, and to know that I

238 - THE AGE OF HAPPY PROBLEMS

was not a young man from Cleveland visiting Miami
Beach as he had toured carnivals, the war, the Caribbean,
Europe, and taken the boat ride around Manhattan. I was
a winter visitor, tired of town, come for the sun, who had
been there before.

Am I now satisfied with what I found? Which is:
"Later really did die. Later died." Just as in the alley
two years ago, in that swept space where there was no
longer any roach and no column of ants, history enters
upon new epochs which begin to grow familiar to me.